Their best minds have definitely not left the company. Probably, just like with Boeing, they're just watching the clock, waiting for their retirement and for the quarterly bonus to come in.
Let's not pretend Intel is dead, they just had a record quarter and my friends working there still got sizable bonuses.
What’s the best case scenario for them though? The mobile market is already permanently blown for them. Best case AMD chips are heavily defective next gen and Intel price/performance blows AMD out of the water with 7nm...which AMD has now already shipped.
My pet theory is that the Trump funds to keep American microchip manufacturing afloat has made a Intel complacent. Maybe they’re just dunces though.
Best case for them is TSMC continues to be heavily capacity constrained for the next few years, handicapping AMD's ability to pick up significant market share while Intel resolves their fab issues. Intel may also have to heavily lean into backporting new designs that have been sitting on the shelf waiting for new nodes. 14nm is finally moving past Skylake-based architectures with Rocket Lake, and there should be opportunities to backport 7nm designs to 10nm as well. Not ideal, but if they can remain roughly competitive with AMD and just out-ship them, that could get them through the next few years without losing much market share.
A US government injection of cash to Intel's fab business seems like it could get bipartisan support if Taiwan/China continue to lead the market, but Intel's problems don't appear to be be cashflow related.
AMD is the exception, not the norm. There are very few companies that can do that turn around. And AMD was lucky that Intel wasn't able to continue their progress. Had Intel still been ahead of AMD, AMD's revenue's wont be growing.
Let's not pretend Intel is dead, they just had a record quarter and my friends working there still got sizable bonuses.