If it's not then it seems an excessive amount of engineers at one time even for Intel. The goal would seem to be to cull the whole team.

Well here is one video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUNJ_tkq2hk

It's on Russian, but shows how underpowered CPU (on paper!) can play with no lags resource hungry game.

So let's back on Intel's issues. Almost 20+ years ago Intel have a huge project that failed. Itanium based on VLIW architecture. Then Intel start pushing P4 architecture (Netburst) to the maximum. I think that they're hit 3GHz barrier and there isn't path beyond that.

And then PentiumM was born (from Israeli team) and soon CD, C2D.