I remember looking into this a while back. They made the whole line super hard to get your hands on. Really curious on the decision making process throughout the line's lifetime.
I interviewed a candidate a couple of years ago who was, at the time, working on Intel's internal self-driving car team. It sounded like a totally directionless, amateurish also-ran catastrophe. Years behind the competition. I wonder if this product line was in a similar situation.
About a dozen years ago I worked for a company that partnered with Intel on a big project. Ultimately the project failed. The biggest problems I saw were:
1) Too many cooks. Different groups from several locations had their fingers all over it. So there were too many expensive, useless features.
2) Too many engineers making product decisions. Engineers often are interested in neat technical features, not in whether a product should include those features. And often engineers don't really care how much those features cost in terms of design time and effort.
3) No real sense of urgency. Consequently there were other, hungrier, companies that ate Intel's lunch.
None of this was new even then. All of this was understood by (other) Intel people way back in the early 1980s. The problem is just how do you herd cats (or engineers or chip architects)? It's very difficult.
You may need to have a small, focused startup to accomplish something. Then that startup gets acquired by the big behemoth. See e.g. Cisco back about 20 years ago. I imagine the same thing happens now, but I don't follow the industry very closely any more.
Also, Cisco at least acquired somewhat related companies. WTF was Intel doing buying companies like McAfee?
Sometimes the spunky competition can even be internal. Again, going back a ways, Intel USA marketing was pushing the architects and engineers to do the Netburst architecture (clock speed was all-important). Which had a lot of problems. Fortunately Intel had what amounted to a startup in Israel. They came up with the Core architecture that saved Intel's ass.