I disagree that Intel has "lost focus" to the detriment of its core competencies, after all, Intel is a large company that spends billions on R&D every quarter.

I disagree that Intel has "lost focus" to the detriment of its core competencies, after all, Intel is a large company that spends billions on R&D every quarter. Rather I call it Intel expanding its focus to expand its addressable market to include 5G, AI, autonomous driving, advanced memory, software-defined networking, etc. I think Francois is focused on Intel being a CPU manufacturing company, when Intel sees itself as a data-processing company. It's important to note that these aren't totally unrelated pushes (a la Google X), but rather all of the new areas leverage Intel's core competency in silicon manufacturing. (Though, many of these products are due to be fabbed at TSMC, according to rumors.) "Xeon should dump unused core space" - Intel already does this. Intel has two CPU microarchitectures - Sunny Cove[1] (used for desktops, laptops, workstations, and beefy servers) and Tremont[2] (used for low-power clients and specialized servers). Tremont ditches the AVX instructions. Notably, Tremont is used in specialized server SoCs that target the storage, networking, and IoT/embedded markets. Could Intel differentiate its product lineup even more? At the core level, one should ask, Are there IPs that should be added to Tremont or subtracted from Sunny Cove? Can some IPs be added at the SoC level? [1]: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/sunny_cove https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/sunny_... [2]: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/tremont https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/tremon...