Intel has some amazing research. I was at an internal fair back in 1999 when I was doing an internship there in the Product Dev group that did the Itanium chipset.

They has this handheld touch screen device that resembled a modern smart phone that was driven by voice recognition. This was 1999 way before the iphone came around.

In my opinion, it is the internal politics and the leadership that has caused them to lose out.

Chip design books in academia were already moving in the direction of low power designs during the late 90s. They just did not take any action.