Well Intel has faced Nokia and Kodak moments literally 6-7 times in the past and survived. Granted not always because their tech was better. But survival has nothing to do with just cheaper prices and better tech. Evidence of that is all over the place.
Intel has mostly just had issues with a specific design, the core approach of better process = better chips is failing for the first time. If being a 18 months ahead means their chip is 5% faster that's not going to maintain huge margins by default. Without those margins they can't stay 18 months ahead.
Which means they need to compete on design for the first time in decades and I have plenty of doubts they can do so.
I don't think that's a good summary of Intel's past approach. The Pentium 4 to Core and Core 2 by way of Pentium M for example - Intel abandoned raw clock counts (what process bought them before) and started targeting IPC, which requires more engineering than pure process improvement.
Yes, there are still gains from getting more transistors for your buck, but you still have to put those transistors to work, and Intel hasn't been a slouch here. The process improvements didn't give them their advantage over AMD.
A large part of why Core/Core 2 worked was very large caches which take extreme transistor counts, but not much else. If they had been forced to cut them in half their performance would have been significantly worse.
P4 Willamette was 42M transisters December 2000, i7 2600k from January 2011 (almost exactly 10 years) is arguably the peak of their Core dominance as progress dropped to a standstill over the last 7 years had 8 MiB of cache. That's 4 cores for 1.16 billion transistors or 290 Million each.
After 1Ghz it's really just a latency game, faster ram does not do much so CPU's without massive caches just starve. Which is why the P4 eventually moved to 130 Million transistors and a relatively large cache.
> Well Intel has faced Nokia and Kodak moments literally 6-7 times in the past and survived.
It's ironic, Kodak invented the Kodak moment but in the end the real Kodak moment was not the positive kind of thing they envisioned when they coined that term in their marketing.
I'm optimistic that they'll be able to almost solely based on their poaching of Jim Keller. If there's a major revolution in instruction sets or architecture to support ML or energy efficient HPC, he's one of the few people with the technical experience and political clout to change the future of Intel.