[petra]

Intel didn't really try. You know who did really try ? espressif, with their famous ESP32.

Or the startups: indie-semi, who sell mcu's built as lego's from multiple dies, affordably! which allows them to do custom-design and semi-custom design of mcu's per customer , while offering a large library of standard mcu's.

Or terechip, who built a chip packaging process who can handle dies orders of magnitude smaller than current systems - opening possibilities for far cheaper mcu's and other simple chips.

Or even ambiq-micro, which created a way to design mcu's that take ~10x(?) less power by enabling transistors to work on an extremely low supply voltage.

This is how you compete with entrenched competitors. By doing something they cannot do.

And Intel ? their fab doesn't even fit mcu's(no flash on logic processes, not good fit for analog). They had no advantage, no differentiation( maybe besides their neural network, a feature that didn't seem to attract customers). How did they expect to win ?

[sqeaky]

Its almost as if they expect that just putting chips into a market makes that market have to buy it, almost as if they have gotten to used to not needing to compete. How could a chip vendor that has thoroughly cornered a few major market segments and might be considered to have some amount of monopoly status ever get into such situation?

[anderspitman]

I'd say the ESP8266 is famous. ESP32 is still pretty new