Intel has failed, or at least failed to distinguish itself, in every single market it has entered since IBM chose the 8088 forty years ago: Every non-x86 instru

Intel has failed, or at least failed to distinguish itself, in every single market it has entered since IBM chose the 8088 forty years ago: Every non-x86 instructional set CPU, flash memory, antivirus (still perhaps the most mystifying move in Intel history), servers/motherboards, and GPUs come to mind. The most successful non-x86 business for Intel is ... Ethernet cards? Meanwhile, it's embarrassed itself with discrete GPUs at least three separate times. A few years ago buying Nvidia would have been a savvy move; now it can no longer do so, and it's not impossible to imagine Nvidia buying Intel in the future. Even within the one market Intel does dominate, what saved the company 15 years ago amid Itanic and Pentium 4 was 1) AMD Thunderbird being just as inefficient as Pentium 4 and, more importantly, 2) an Intel Israel skunk works project to improve on the Pentium 3. There is no such out-of-the-blue miracle this time.