Intel - Intel - tried to compete in the embedded market and has recently quietly withdrawn several of its products. It's a tougher market than it sounds, and it's also more conservative than you'd expect.
True, many are indeed using ARM (in house designs are also more popular than you might think in deeply embedded SoCs), but a lot of companies would love to be able to throw out ARM due to licensing cost & hassle, or at least have a viable option in RISC-V to throw at ARM at the bargaining table.
Intel didn't really try. You know who did really try ? espressif, with their famous ESP32.
Or the startups: indie-semi, who sell mcu's built as lego's from multiple dies, affordably! which allows them to do custom-design and semi-custom design of mcu's per customer , while offering a large library of standard mcu's.
Or terechip, who built a chip packaging process who can handle dies orders of magnitude smaller than current systems - opening possibilities for far cheaper mcu's and other simple chips.
Or even ambiq-micro, which created a way to design mcu's that take ~10x(?) less power by enabling transistors to work on an extremely low supply voltage.
This is how you compete with entrenched competitors. By doing something they cannot do.
And Intel ? their fab doesn't even fit mcu's(no flash on logic processes, not good fit for analog). They had no advantage, no differentiation( maybe besides their neural network, a feature that didn't seem to attract customers). How did they expect to win ?
Its almost as if they expect that just putting chips into a market makes that market have to buy it, almost as if they have gotten to used to not needing to compete. How could a chip vendor that has thoroughly cornered a few major market segments and might be considered to have some amount of monopoly status ever get into such situation?
Intel is expensive, and not very power efficient in tiny chips.
ARM is much cheaper and more efficient. RISC-V is similar to ARM, but even more cheaper.
I think a combination of things, really. They never scaled down properly to really low end devices. The Intel systems had poor peripherals for some reason with high latency. They didn't really grasp the detail of what was needed for either the "maker" or industrial markets. And of course it wasn't a licensable IP.
Intel - Intel - tried to compete in the embedded market and has recently quietly withdrawn several of its products. It's a tougher market than it sounds, and it's also more conservative than you'd expect.