Intel is on life support. Can anything save it?

Fabs. They're one of the few companies that actually owns/builds state-of-the-art fabs, in a critical field where the main competitor is at risk of having its main production sites destroyed in a war everyone is expecting to happen.

They used to have stellar engineers. Are the good ones still there?

But their struggles on 10nm and the fact that Lunar Lake is on TSMC tells me that they are not good at making chips.

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.

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.

Reasons for the prediction:

1. Intel is not longer the process node leader and hasn't been for a while (when even was that? 14nm? 2014?).

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.

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.

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 dozen different Core i5 14 gen SKUs, and over 20! 13 gen Core i5 SKUs. There's probably 200 different brand-new-from-Intel CPU SKUs on the market today. Insane.

5. They're getting feature for feature beaten by smaller, lower stakes competitors both in and out 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.

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.

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.

The ECU in your car doesn't benefit much from newer processes, but the chips required for self-driving do.

That's the special thing about leading semiconductors: they enable other technologies. From the personal computer to IoT and AI, all of these were at some point enabled by advances in semiconductor scaling.

You're only focused on what leading edge nodes provide today, but they enable much more than just speculative AI hyperscaling in the long term.