Eli5: Why are there only two competitors in the comercial GPU (AMD/Nvidia) and CPU (AMD/Intel) market? Does this phenomenon also happen in other parts of large scale industry?
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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.
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