According to the brief, there's insider information from Europe that Intel may be shaking hands with Motorola to take their unprofitable chip division off their hands. Still, it's damn fun to speculate on the motives and the ensuant madness that would explode from a incendiary device like this. Let's imagine for a moment. Motorola takes a marginal bath on it's yearly operations on small margin chips that populate some fringe workstations that IBM can retool in a heartbeat. Motorola has it's hands full with a million other devices including it's own satelite field that will handle remote cell phone and data traffic, thus putting an artifical ring around the planet, Max Headroom style.
Chips are now a distraction in comparrision.
Intel is retooling it's processors into more RISC based hybrids to compliment it's CISC strategy to put 1MEGmhz processors onto a reduced price market that would be ready for upgrade in a few years. If the whole darn processor line dies, the PPC position would be dammage control from hell. Don't snigger in doubt, crazier things have happened when mega-mergers occur. That is, if Apple was still in business long enough to recomplile many man-years of OS code to support such a drama. I'll be laughing my ass off if it actually came to pass.