How once-iconic Intel fell into a 20-year decline

Fortune ^ | 08/10/2025 | Geoff Colvin

[Kid Shelleen]

---SNIP--- It’s decline began some 20 years ago, when the company made multiple acquisitions, many of which were in telecommunications and wireless technology. In concept, that made great sense. But acquiring businesses is a skill of its own, and David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who was on Intel’s board of directors at the time, told Fortune “100% of those acquisitions failed. We spent $12 billion, and the return was zero or negative.”

Intel also tried unsuccessfully to grasp the mammoth cell phone opportunity. The company understood the opportunity and was supplying chips for the highly popular BlackBerry phone. The chips were designed by Arm, a British firm that designs chips but doesn’t manufacture them. Intel understandably preferred to make phone chips with its own architecture, known as x86. The company decided to stop making Arm chips and to create an x86 chip for cell phones—in retrospect, “a major strategic error,” says Yoffie. “The plan was that we would have a competitive product within a year, and we ended up not having a competitive product within a decade,” he recalls. “It wasn’t that we missed it. It was that we screwed it up.”

[ConservativeMind]

Intel had decades of hubris, with AMD not doing much—until it came up with the preferred 64-bit extensions. It caught Intel with its pants down.

Intel always had innovations in reserve to drop with little effort, if AMD or others leapfrogged it. Eventually, those all played out and Intel continued to have high power issues, as well.

My wife and I specifically bought our last laptops with good AMD chipsets. We have no desire to go back to Intel.

[mowowie]

For the first time ever I’m going AMD for my next PC rebuild.

[Secret Agent Man]

AMD and some form of linux?

[House Atreides]

In a word… COMPLACENCY!

[Henchster]

"How once-iconic Intel fell into a 20-year decline"

Andrew Grove left.

[Windcatcher]

Up until the early 2000’s, clock rate kept climbing which drove a lot of upgrades, until it hit a wall. We’ve been stuck at a maximum of 3.4GHz give or take for many years. No one has figured out how to exceed it (except for very short bursts) without things melting.

[RockyTx]

what is Intel, without X86?

please be specific

[bigbob]

I’ll give you two more: Craig Barrett

[dfwgator]

The bean counters took over.

[Blurb2350]

More recently, its Malaysia-born Chinese CEO Lip-Bu Tan has been linked to the CCP, sending the company’s stock into a tailspin.

[Bobbyvotes]

Cisco stock keeps going up.

[sasquatch]

Spent many years at intel under Andy. You’re correct.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

As a consumer, their product line is too confusing. All these different "lake" names etc. I want to
know the genealogy of their lineup. I want to compare generations. I gave up years ago. At least
AMD is somewhat easier to score.

[j.havenfarm]

Well, no one can beat Sears Roebuck for passing on the opportunity to go big into online sales. Cost that company its life. I think they have a dozen or so stores left, having once been the world’s biggest retailer

[Olog-hai]

Answer: Letting Red China get their hooks in.

[Dr. Sivana]

what is Intel, without X86?

Chipsets. that’s why I always bought Intel, because of solid chipsets to complement the CPU. They got out of SSDs, And I think they got out of NICs. They stopped making server mainboards. Not much left.

[Tellurian]

Sears: Whittier, Burbank, & Concord CA, Orlando & Miami in FL, El Paso TX, Boston MA, and Puerto Rico. Recently went from 4 to 3 in CA, and 2 to 0 in Washington state.

[RoosterRedux]

I've been an AMD investor for quite a while now. It retreated when Lisa Su—smartly—repositioned the company more completely into AI, but all my analyses show AMD is still at the head of the race, right behind Nvidia.

As an aside, Lisa Su is Jenson Huang's cousin. Small world.

[Advil000]

You are a leap or two behind. Current desktop CPUs with a big air cooler nothing exotic can sustain above 5Ghz across 8 or 16 cores indefinitely.

The next milestone is rumored to be 7Ghz.

But no, clock speed per core on x86 is no longer going to increase by huge amounts per year. That’s over.