As recently as two decades ago, Intel was 100% focused not only on PC CPUs, but on computing as a whole.

Intel led.

The succession of Intel CEOs since Andy Grove exited have been strategically gormless, listing hither and tither to the tune of Wall Street, and having no strategy other than recklessly trying to maintain "Moore's Law".

They were encircled, and are almost at the point of utter vanquishing by their even former gnat, AMD.

Alas! How are the formerly mighty incumbent fallen!

There are two roads ahead for Intel: a determined will to return to chip supremacy by delivering truly desirable and world-beating CPUs and GPUs, or continue n this slow path to IBM-style irrelevancy.

And NO!, the current line of Intel Iris Xe pieces of merde won't do.

Not at all.

Seeing Intel do the dog-and-pony over Iris Xe is enough to make one feel like reaching remotely across the Internet through one's desktop monitors, and slap the living daylights out of the Intel product presenter.

Or better yet, horsewhip the yum-yum. (Apropos image below.👇🏾)

For a while in the past couple of decades, it always seemed as if Intel was holding back the knockout punch in every generation of x86 chips delivered, while simultaneously ignoring the GPU market.

Now, we, of course know better: Intel had run out of innovation gas as regards x86, and were just treading water. As a result, it could only "iterate" x86 with faster clock speeds, and other minuscule incremental upgrades.

And kept gloating about beating AMD.

Meanwhile, NVIDIA was having a field day, feasting on Intel's exposed GPU flank.

Those GPU profits fueled its AI chip business.

The rest, you already know.

So, does Intel pull an IBM, and become the forgotten pioneer?

Or, will it will it start to truly innovate, and deliver not just barely-incremental performance increases across the board in CPUs, and develop or buy its way to dominance in GPUs and AI processors?

One fork in the road leads to greatness. The other fork to, well, Armonk.

Time will tell.