Intel has a decades long history of very poor top level engineering management. They got petrified about the issue of how much DRAM they'd be able to put in a system in the 1990 (remember Rambus RDRAM?), and among the consequences was a 1 million part recall of motherboards shipped to Dell just before they were going to be shipped to customers, plus another related one I can't remember the details of yet.

This speaks to the sorts of dysfunction you're speaking of; certainly someone at Intel realized these parts weren't going to work in the real world.