I'm going to call it, and write it here so that I can link back to this comment in a few years to see how right or wrong I was.<p>Prediction: Intel is done. It will become a zombie company like IBM or Oracle in a few years, without the license lock-in moat keeping those rotting corpses alive, but may be able to offer cheaper fab services for "it just was the state of the art" chip manufacturing market. They'll continue to focus on becoming a financial optimization organization and never return to being a technical leader. They've become a company of pure inertia.<p>Reasons for the prediction:<p>1. Intel is not longer the process node leader and hasn't been for a while (when even was that? 14nm? 2014?).<p>2. Intel seems to be struggling to keep lead engineering talent, board members, and leaders of all kinds. Jim Kelly, Lip-Bu Tan, and so on. They still have Jeff Wilcox, but who knows for how long? At least the CEO is an engineer finally...I guess.<p>3. They continue to launch then retract in otherwise profitable markets, not taking any particular lead, but not continuing to invest until they get it. They still have really only one core business.<p>4. Their branding strategy seems to be built around confusing consumers in the hopes that they accidentally buy the wrong things. Successful companies can be clear in their product naming, zombie companies end up trying to stuff every single market niche with as much microtuned, barely differentiated, SKUs as possible. In actuality it's probably financial engineering to figure out what to do with various classes of yield issues. Disable the bad part of the chip, slap a K or KS, or KF, or T, or whatever on it and get it on the shelf. I counted over a <i>dozen</i> different Core i5 14 gen SKUs, and over <i>20!</i> 13 gen Core i5 SKUs. There's probably 200 different brand-new-from-Intel CPU SKUs on the market today. Insane.<p>5. They're getting feature for feature beaten by smaller, lower stakes competitors both in and <i>out</i> of their ISA. Those same competitors are almost always cheaper, and made at other fabs. In otherwords, Intel doesn't lead anywhere and has no lock-in.<p>6. Their main moat, their ISA, can be comfortably virtualized or emulated elsewhere, bugs and all, at entirely useful speeds meaning there is a ready exit ramp as customers wish to take it.<p>There's probably more, and it's probably continues to paint a very poor picture, but there is very little reason today, or in the near future, to stay with Intel as a manufacturer except for inertia.