Actually in a relative sense the pandemic clearly helps Intel. Their problem right now is that they have an inferior process and their high margin datacenter p

Actually in a relative sense the pandemic clearly helps Intel. Their problem right now is that they have an inferior process and their high margin datacenter parts[1] are in critical danger of facing competition from devices fabbed by TSMC and (to a lesser extent) Samsung. Their offerings in the market now, though, are still winning and Intel is making a ton of money. So the net effect of a downturn is that the future market, the one where AMD is competetive and Intel needs to drop prices, is going to shrink in total dollars. That's a win for Intel, comparatively. It means the window into which AMD could have jumped to steal revenue is smaller, and Intel has more time to catch up. [1] Remember that most of the money in the CPU industry is made in the datacenter. AMD having better desktop parts doesn't affect Intel's bottom line much as long as they remain competitive in servers. (AMD still lags with laptop devices too, which are also a bigger market than desktops).