Its a weird company:

* They got their LTE modem into the iPhone 11 but just couldn't compete. * ARC GPUs would have been competitve if they had be launched a year or two sooner and its stagnancy is widley due to lack of funding since the market was dead during launch and we were in a massive market pullback where they were ultra hesitatnt to spend ANY money. (massive layoffs too) * Optane was a great product and had a good roadmap, but they were burning cash waiting for adoption and their customers had decoupled their memory and storage from the physical layer to mitigate limitations of NAND ssd so much that they didn't see the price as worth it, despite the obvious latency and endurance benefits that it had over even SLC NAND drives.

Sometimes they just miss the market for otherwise good products.

> They got their LTE modem into the iPhone 11 but just couldn't compete

it wasn't "just couldn't compete", those modems were horrible. the speed was lower than the Qualcomm that managed to be shipped in some of the iphones (from 8-11), and the connections were extremely flaky. I had a 9 with an intel modem, and it was abysmal compared to the previous iPhones I had owned.

that apple went back to Qualcomm, bought the intel division, and still is shipping Qualcomm modems says a lot -- it's still just not there.

Intel modems were measurable worse. One telecoms blog used a proper testset to measure 10dB worse sensitivity across the board.

And this was even before being slower even with strong signals.

So slower and noticably worse range. Modems are hard and take a long time to have small things ironed out here and there. Small things add up.

The Arc is very competitive at the price points it's available.

I can’t entirely blame WiMax on Intel. I only saw it from the sidelines, but I had a laptop with integrated WiMax (complete with Intel chipset and an apparently functional antenna) in a market where Sprint had their much hyped SDR network, and they had WiMax working enough for their trade show folks to demonstrate it. But it was not one of their launch markets, so they… didn’t launch. They literally refused to take my money and sell me service.

I don’t care how well Intel executes and how well your launch market functions, if you’re selling a product that caters to business travelers and users, you had better actually be willing to sell the thing, across a large swath of the country, or it will fail regardless of how good it is.

Don't forget Ultra Wide Band (another project that set fire to a pile of money used for hardware and software development), and the jettisoning of StrongARM.

I have a hard time believing that Intel will succeed at being a foundry this time around given how many failed prior attempts they have made. The foundry model is incompatible with the high margin duopoly CPU vendor model. What will prevent Intel from scheduling their own high margin products in fabs over foundry work from other companies? They will always have a business incentive to deprioritize their foundry customers when push comes to shove.

Reading some of the comments made by TSMC are enlightening. One of the reasons TSMC provided for their ability to succeed when Intel was flailing with their 10nm+++++ process is that TSMC runs experiments 24/7. This allows TSMC to run more experiments per day/week/month than Intel. I would really like to know when Intel starts running 3 shifts of process development engineers at a single fab to iterate faster, as that would be a true sign that meaningful change has occurred inside the beast.

Good luck finding enough engineers who want to work those shifts. That might work in Taiwan, or mainland China (where 996 work is normal), but not in the US.