You are right that the technology keeps marching on in exciting ways. However, that role in the organization is often mostly about bookkeeping, selling product to customers, selling the stock to investors, and selling the corporate strategy to the board of directors. Intel is at a crossroads where independent survival is both a near term challenge requiring constant cost cutting, and a long term challenge, requiring significant investment.
Not that Nokia is without challenges.

Good points all around, Mike. I remain hopeful. A decade ago, people were writing off AMD, which at the time I said was foolish as long as they had a desktop PC business from which to get revenue and some profits on which to build. The same applied here — except that it is complicated and compounded by the needs of the foundry business. Intel used to have a strategic advantage because of its foundry and there is a chance — a very expensive chance — that it can get there again.

Intel’s Data Center and AI group is in a difficult spot right now but it’s not hopeless. Intel will be in a completely different position if they can get high yields on both 18A and their high-NA EUV 14A processes. Intel’s Board of Directors and Intel’s whole management team have to know that getting high yields on these new process technologies is a do-or-die situation for them.

Intel got lazy when they had a strong monopoly. They wasted their engineering resources on things like Intel On Demand that antagonized customers instead of doing things that help customers, like adding better support for large language models on their server CPUs. I expect Intel to learn from their mistakes so I have confidence that Diamond Rapids will be good. My main worry is whether Intel will be able to manufacture it. Regardless of whether AGI happens or we just get increasingly powerful assistants with a different type of intelligence, these are interesting times for server CPUs.