Intel had an ARM chip division for Phone CPUs called XScale from 2002 to 2006 when they sold it to Marvell to focus on the more profitable x86 series.[1] He may have believed the x86 Atom chips could replace the XScale.

Xscale was widely used in Palm Treo's, Sony Clie's most Compaq Poquet PC's and the original Amazon Kindle.

His "biggest regret" comment is pure rewriting of history.

He made the wrong decision to get out of phone CPUs.

This is probably one of the biggest blunders in Intel's history.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale

Read a few comments below lamenting about lost profits. Odd, because I’m thanking the lucky stars we don’t have more consolidation in the industry.

Intel sure left a whole lot of money on the table for the TSMC's of the world to use for R&D and for capital expenditures like building more Fabs.

Well, probably we would still see Apple develop their own CPUs. Intel just couldn't deliver on the low power promise.

Well, they didn't have a competing product at the time. Atom on phones is kinda new, and I'm not sure it would fit Apple's requirements of battery life, etc

Probably not much different, since Intel's baseband is on many versions of the iPhone.