The shadow of the relentless Andy Grove, who ran Intel for more than a decade at the end of the last century, still looms large at the US chipmaker. He was a hard taskmaster, instilling a culture of operational excellence. The title of one of his books — "Only the paranoid survive" — became a watchword for how to avoid the tech industry's frequent upheavals.
The days since midsummer haven't been kind to Grove's legacy. First Apple dropped Intel as the supplier of processors for its Mac computers, switching to an in-house chip based on technology from ARM. Low-power chip designs from the SoftBank-owned company already froze Intel out of the smartphone market.
Then, this week, Intel lost the title of most valuable American chipmaker. The crown was seized by Nvidia, which was thought of until recently as little more than a specialised producer of chips for high-end video gaming systems. Its shares have risen twenty-fold over the past five years as it has succeeded in adapting its graphics chips, or GPUs, to other data-intensive tasks, most notably training the machine-learning algorithms at the heart of today's AI systems.
Other rivals have also made headway. TSMC, the manufacturer, or "foundry", that turns out chips for other companies (including Nvidia), overtook Intel in market cap terms some time ago. AMD, which has long struggled to make a dent in the market for x86 chip architecture dominated by Intel, has bounced back with designs that are winning a strong following from massive customers like Google.
Half a decade ago, Intel was worth as much as these three companies combined, and its market value has since doubled to nearly US$250 billion ($381.7b). But the basket of competitors is now worth more than US$620b.