Intel used to make the best ARM CPUs on the market, check out xscale.

Sure, and then Intel discontinued it. Just like the i860.

used to being the operative phrase there.

of course it is. just saying that they could if they wanted.

Could they, though? If all the dozens or so people who could really drive a new big ARM project are at Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and NVidia, they might struggle to assemble a team that could make the needed breakthroughs to differentiate it. They also don't seem to have much interest from a business standpoint, preferring instead to sell $2k+ Xeons all day...and I hope EPYC gives them a real competitor.

Intel manufacured 32-bit ARMv5 chips via a unit originally acquired from DEC in '97. It was sold to Marvell 10 years ago. It's hard to see how any of this would help Intel create competitive ARMv8 server-class chips, but you're right, given their market hold of their x86 chips they clearly have the means to do it. However it would probably take a significant amount of time, and they would have real competition. Sadly, I don't think they'll be investing into server-class 64-bit ARMv8 chips, and that's a mistake. CPUs are a commodity now, and the architecture wars are largely irrelevant with a heavy push towards OSS stacks. It's a race to the bottom, and ARM chips are going to be simpler for the same amount of performance, and that means ultimately cheaper.

I think, based on their past, that's a very optimistic "could".

I see no reason to believe that they could do so, organizationally, even if there was a desire to.