Well, just to be technical, Intel has never had a monopoly on the market. A traditional monopoly is one where you can only buy from one source. The best example would be your utilities. The gas company puts gas in one end of the pipe and you buy it at whatever price the government allows them to sell it for.
The market for processors is more of an oligopoly where Intel could technically double prices for the next generation but they won't. If they did that, then AMD would be able to run up their prices and pay off some of the massive debt that they have incurred trying to keep up with Intel. On the other hand, Intel could half their prices for a while and force AMD to go into bankruptcy. Once that was done, Intel would have a true monopoly and they could charge whatever price they felt like.
Of course, if intel then decided that processors should cost $1,000, Motorola/IBM/Transmeta would then find a ripe market for the picking and that would kick off another cycle of price cuts. Obviously, Intel will not do that as the devil you do know is better than the one you don't. Far better to keep AMD around and with just enough cash to stay in business.
But apart from that, yes, it is always good to see when Intel misses a market target and AMD gets the boost. Especially in something like a server chip where the markup is higher than for a consumer chip. Of course, at the best of times, servers are a fairly small part of the market. Even so, when AMD gets a temporary infusion of cash (especially at a time like this when Intel is not willing to move on the Pentium M), this means that AMD can climb just a bit further out of the hole that they are in. It would take more than one missed tareget in Intel's part for AMD to actually break free of the situation. Even then, they could drop back in just by making their own screw ups, which sadly they seem to be all too able to manage.
However, if they did ever get a deal with Dell, it could well put tehm in a fairly good position after some time. They already have as many actual buildings as they need, now if they could afford to fill them with the steppers that could do the 65nm process, they could possibly move up in the market enough to make a decent stab at a goal like 30% market share. If they could only get there and maintain the situation for about two years, then they might have a decent chance at casting off the strings that Intel uses to play them like a puppet.
