Even beyond using linux as a desktop OS, Intel has had an internal Linux distro for a much longer time (if I remember right, they were still stuck on Linux 2.4.

Even beyond using linux as a desktop OS, Intel has had an internal Linux distro for a much longer time (if I remember right, they were still stuck on Linux 2.4.x back in 2007, as re-writing a lot of their custom drivers and kernel changes would was taking them a long time to move up to 2.6.x). A lot of their new CPU testing (for development and QA) is done with Linux. It just gave them the control they needed to test new CPUs, chipsets, and other components.