The difference now is that Intel is being run by an engineer again so at very least there might be some top-down strategy.
I like Pat, I like what Pat says, I get plans are long term, but it still feels like the rubber is not meeting the road.
Like? I hope you aren't talking about Optane
Nervana, canceled in favor of Havana's Gaudi (though fortunately Gaudi 3 missed the axe).
And there are smaller things here and there, like the cancellation of iGPU-heavy designs like Broadwell or Skylake with eDRAM, and some rumors like the cancellation of the Arc Battlemage big die (albeit from a questionably reliable source).
I believe that was/is impressive tech.
You could have disk and ram in one stick aka kinda unified memory.
Think of it: instead of purchasing RAM+Disk, you purchase one stick and configure it as e.g 40% of the capacity works as a disk and 60% as a "RAM".
But saying that they "cancelled" doesn't tell the whole story.
IIRC: they couldnt find a fab which would produce them after Micron sold their fab.
The amount of application where it was actually better was very few. And unlike flash and dram it had no huge commodity market to drive down the price.
This podcast has a lot of interesting discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf6a_32vvbU