Agreed. This is a very capital intensive business. They should be investing that capital into upgrading their technology. The dividend should be off the table for the next few years, at least. Paying a dividend probably made sense in the 90s and even into the early 2000s when Intel pretty much owned the whole PC CPU market. But now they're in a tough spot and the only way out is to invest that money that they're throwing out there as dividends.
Intel lost this battle years ago when leadership decided to badge engineer the shit out of their product portfolio and do stock buy-backs. In a capital intensive enterprise, Jack Welch school of management will only give the company maybe 10 years before those opportunity costs blow signifgant holes in your boat. Look at TSMC, they take government money, invested that in people and material. They’ve got a work plan in place to meet their customers needs which in turn is driving market direction. GF was left for dead and look at what they’re doing. They’re eating Intel’s lunch now while they’re flailing with mediocre graphic cards and no clear strategy where they’re going with future x86 designs. The universe is moving towards RISC and they’re essentially locked in a prison of their own making.
Of all the things you picked the least relevant one. Intel without GPUs is dead. Gone. Zero. A foundry at best, with a decade to be top tier again. Intel without RISC is… fine? The instruction set doesn’t matter, the underlying hardware doesn’t execute it anyway, it runs microcode.
