I'm sure they had the right ideas, but they strayed way too far from the fundamentals. Remember that in Grove's time Intel was getting clobbered in benchmarks

I'm sure they had the right ideas, but they strayed way too far from the fundamentals. Remember that in Grove's time Intel was getting clobbered in benchmarks by the DEC Alpha chip and was struggling to keep up with the PowerPC consortium. It was through their relentless pursuit of clock-speed at any cost that they prevailed. Unfortunately they slammed into the 4GHz barrier earlier and harder than the competition and went into a spiral of confusion for nearly half a decade. Adding more and more stages to their pipelines was the primary strategy for pushing higher and higher clockspeeds. What saved them in the end was the very pragmatic and practical Pentium III platform, the one introduced a few years before Grove retired, not the outlandish and massively power hungry Pentium 4 architecture. Grove did seem to keep the company focused on relentless incremental improvement. This is in stark contrast to the later Intel which showed unbelievable hubris with their VLIW effort thinking that people would spontaneously adopt a whole new architecture just because. Maybe they listened to their partner HP way too much as that company is quite clearly utterly clueless.