In light of Gamers Nexus video today "COLLAPSE: Intel is Falling Apart" here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXVQVbAFh6I
I wanted to remind everyone that in 2015 Intel laid off thousands of workers and then engaged in discrimination to in order to spend millions on "Diversity" goals: Intel Allocates $300 Million for Workplace Diversity https://archive.is/LvtO3 and https://archive.is/trAnL
Now that Intel wasn't making stock market gains fast enough they booted Gelsinger and now we get to watch it burn.
The seeds were planted earlier, but 2015 was where the damage became evident. In one word...
Cove.
I cannot put this boldly enough: the rollout of 10nm was a FUCKING DISASTER for Intel. Worse, they couldn't even manage to fire Krzanich over it, they had to get rid of him over sleeping around with coworkers.
As for WHY 10nm was a disaster... Intel tried to get clever. They knew extreme ultraviolet lithography wouldn't be ready on the timetable they wanted, so they resorted to using exotic patterning techniques that caused their defect rate to explode. To deliver the product they wanted, with the methods they were comfortable with, they would have had to punt on the tick-tock model. Which is effectively what happened anyway.
But as we know now the real killing blow was that AMD actually learned from their mistakes. Zen didn't have to be perfect, it just had to less bad than Bulldozer was, and less watt thirsty than Intel's equivalent.