The demand for AI is helping Nvidia and AMD leapfrog Intel

Intel is the king of a shrinking kingdom. Almost every traditional desktop or laptop PC runs on the Santa Clara company's processors, but that tradition is fast being eroded by more mobile, ARM-powered alternatives. Apple's most important personal computers now run iOS, Google's flagship Chromebook has an ARM flavor, and Microsoft just announced Windows for ARM. And what's more, the burden of processing tasks is shifting away from the personal device and distributed out to networks of server farms up in the proverbial cloud, leaving Intel with a big portfolio of chips and no obvious customer to sell millions of them to. If you want to talk about the most influential chip company in history, Intel's name is the one you want.