If you've never read Andy Grove's book "High Output Management" then you are missing out. It's one of the only management books I'll ever recommend. Truly great practical advice.
Pairs very well with Grove's dictum of Objectives and Key Statements (OKRs). These and Grove's management philosophy are captured very well in John Doerr's book 'Measure what Matters'
I toured Intel around this time and attended a press Q&A with Andy Grove. It was amazing. He was lively and fun and thoughtful. We received a printed copy of a booklet entitled WIRLII - What's It Really Like Inside Intel. It covered corporate culture, which was very Andy-centric, including the habit of starting meetings exactly on time (and not allowing late people in). Powerpoint was widespread, but our tour guides used low-tech "foils" (aka clear sheets on an overhead projector) for the presentations. Fascinating guy.
So much of this holds up, and then you get to RISC vs CISC. It's amazing Intel has managed to survive and even thrive after failing so hard to adapt to the changing environment.
Intel were in a sense lucky, their x86 was just about the most RISCy of the contemporary CISCs - opcodes are (almost) all one memory operand, no indirect memory modes, no autoincrement modes (except for stack) etc etc which means instruction retry on things like page faults are easy because of few side effects
And they were basically able to transition to chips that were architecturally pretty much RISC while maintaining CISC compatibility.
Furthermore, they did bet too much on frequency with x86 and compile-time optimization with Itanium, in part because a major partner was so focused on single thread performance. But, although AMD had some short-term success with Opteron, Intel was able to retrench and win out. It continues to have challenges in mobile and other areas but is still more successful than not.
That's why I said "survived, and even thrived". That said, we haven't been in this era very long. Microsoft has done extremely well milking Windows and Office, but that's probably not future proof either.
