The acquisition that is discussed about is fab business, not the entire company. They do have a solid winner in laptops (Lunar Lake) that will cover midrange and low end for sure. AMD is beating them left and right in every other industry. Given how big laptop market is, Intel better not lose grip here. Once the mindshare shifts to AMD here, there is no way Intel will recover. When AMD was down (bulldozer), they only had Intel to fight against. But now, Intel has to fight AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm (Microsoft), Apple and it is very hard to come back once they fall behind.
These other brands are lean and are innovating at rapid pace. Look at M4 reviews that came out yesterday. Intel will not have any answer to premium and high performance markets. In midrange market, we now have the Mac Mini that is just brilliant. Qualcomm's upcoming X v2 chips will further push Intel away from premium/performance segment. Moreover, these companies have very high margins and Intel is getting peanuts for each CPU sold. It just looks like Intel is on course to be the Xiaomi of computing.
