Mainly because of how difficult the development and research is. These three companies have been at it for such a long time now that they’re extremely efficient at developing new tech. Just look at Intel trying to join the GPU market, you would think that they could make a product that can immediately rival the other 2 since intel is in the chip market for years now but they couldn’t. It would take them a couple more years and a few million dollars just to compete.
*ARM (and their licensees) executives shrug as they look at their billions…*
Chip manufacturing is a natural monopoly, or in this case oligopoly. The barriers to entry at this stage are insurmountable with the lack of outside access to specialist manufacturing facilities and licenses to designs. Mergers and buyouts are mutually beneficial to David and Goliath (but not the customer) so many have been passed without the competition commissions of various countries intervening.
ARM was going to be bought out by Nvidia, but government intervention stopped it.
Making GPU’s and CPU’s that are *good*, is very difficult.
By good I mean fast and power efficient.
Also some technologies that are almost vital to being widely used are only licensed from the big guys (instruction sets)
Another company (that would be a rival) would need to have the money to pay for the licensing, and money to develop and get good at developing (operating costs) in order to have any hope of succeeding.
That would be a large amount of money and time to risk, for a small potential gain.
You’ve got some partial answers, but they miss some important parts (at least for the CPU side).
As someone notes, ARM is a huge thing in the microprocessor market, but primarily for mobile phones and other small devices where efficiency is key. Intel and AMD pretty much own the desktop market.
The key reason for this is that AMD and Intel are in charge of the x86 instruction set (and all extensions of said instruction set). This is the list of things that their CPUs can do, and the technology of how it works. Other people could potentially reverse engineer their CPUs, but doing so would not be legal as AMD and Intel have all the patents (with a cross-license agreement between them).
This means that other CPU manufacturers need to use different instruction sets, such as ARM, but this means that all the software is no longer compatible. This is the difficulty that, eg, Apple had when switching away from Intel to ARM. Apple averted most of this issue by some clever software that translates x86 software to ARM.
For GPUs, as others said the difficulty is making a competitive product in a fast moving market. Intel is an example of this as they have just entered the GPU market and even with many years of experience making integrated GPUs for their CPUs, they struggled to make a GPU that could compete with even the low end of the current market.
Large passenger airplanes are almost exclusively built by Airbus and Boeing.
Almost all smartphones use Android or iOS.
For launching a big satellite there are just a handful of options, or sometimes just a single one depending on the satellite. If you want a short trip to space (without going to orbit) there are just Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic – both currently not flying for different reasons, however. If you want to get people to orbit (commercially) then SpaceX is the only option at the moment.
It’s typical for industries where you need to spend billions on infrastructure and development before you can sell anything. The existing companies have all that already, so staying in the industry is far easier (cheaper) than entering it.
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