Intel is in too many businesses. I've never figured out why they made motherboard chipsets or motherboards - both of which are low-margin businesses. Then there was that fiasco where Intel insisted on the Rambus memory standard because it owned a big chunk of Rambus stock, only to back down when the total system cost of Intel systems with Rambus memory got too out of whack. Intel is all over the map except where it needs to be - the king of the CPU world. The Pentium 4 and the Itanium were both expensive fiascos. AMD showed that you could use a lineal descendant of the x86 standard and beat Intel at its own game. Intel had to spend all that extra cash and then end up using x86-based chips (Pentium 3/M) in its laptops, because the Pentium 4 architecture required too much power. Intel simply needs to hire AMD's CEO and start doing what it used to do - stick to its knitting and clean its CPU competitors' clocks.
I'd forgotten the Rambus fiasco. A guy I worked with built a system with Rambus and he was quite surprised when he found out that he had to buy blank memory chips (Rambus RIMM Continuity module..amazing what Google will come up with) because the system wouldn't run with empty memory slots.