[jakobson14]

ultimately it was a focus on marketing that led them to kill engineering

(if itanium and the many failures and lucky breaks that led up to it hadn't already convinced you that intel might never have had good engineering)

[PaulHoule]

Intel tried to get away from x86 over and over again with radically overengineered architectures that didn't work (as well as mainstream architectures) and failed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium