Intel has a long and unfortunate history with promising initiatives into new markets outside their core, and then promptly cutting and running when there's obst

Intel has a long and unfortunate history with promising initiatives into new markets outside their core, and then promptly cutting and running when there's obstacles to those efforts... and I say that as a former (long ago, circa 2000) Intel employee. Intel saw the explosion of graphics chipsets and decided to try its hand with the i740. After initial teething pains, they designed the i752 and i754 to address these concerns but renewed competition from AMD started to cut their x86 margins and rather than continue on the broader product path, they ejected the graphics business and ran back to Mama x86. In 1999 and 2000, Intel made several substantial acquisitions in the networking space regarding routers, load balancers, etc. They aggressively tried to move into these markets (I know, I was a sales engineer for that line at the time) but between AMD's Sledgehammer and the dotbomb they promptly fled those markets as well in order to run back to x86. I can't argue that those were poor business decisions, but I can say that anyone depending on hardware initiatives from Intel that aren't directly x86-related are skating on some mighty thin ice.