I'm not sure how authoritative other commenter are, but I would be very surprised that Intel was going so far to accommodate them beyond fusing perf profile/ME

I'm not sure how authoritative other commenter are, but I would be very surprised that Intel was going so far to accommodate them beyond fusing perf profile/ME feature/or some small IP block. With my knowledge of their sales tactic, I would imagine Intel could've simply said "You are free to buy AMD," with full knowledge that just few years ago their clients had no other option than coming back to them eventually.