Your links don’t support your contention that Intel was on the brink of going belly-up.
I knew some of its top process engineers well in the timeframe in question. Unless my incipient Alzheimer’s has taken a real leap in the past hour, at no point were they on any brink of any belly-up.
I remember very vividly the number of irate customers that wanted to return their machine and or sue INTEL. The CEO at the time stated that there was nothing wrong with their CPU's for the average user, and as such they would not be replacing them. Within 1 week of his idiotic statement, our phones were ringing off the hook.
Not long after, INTEL decided that they would in fact replace said CPU's, talk in the industry was that INTEL was getting an earful from their distributors and customers. Having said that, what do you think would have happened if he stuck by his original statement?