>Profits are important as a publicly held company but Intel needs a new from-scratch improved microarchitecture which isn't based on the venerable Pentium Pro,

>Profits are important as a publicly held company but Intel needs a new from-scratch improved microarchitecture which isn't based on the venerable Pentium Pro, which is basically what we're all running a riced up version of even today. Indeed. In the one market Intel dominates, 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. Meanwhile, 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.