> Intel, especially in upper management, is stuffed with people who assumed that was impossible. And faced with new competition from GPUs, the only acceptable response to management was the many-x86, "you don't have to rewrite your code to get performance" approach which didn't actually work out.

I think the big disconnect is thinking they had to make people rewrite code. CUDA often targets entirely new codebases, and in some cases new types applications.

The "rewriting of code" is mostly for things like AV processing and codecs where there was such a sellable benefit in performance it would have been insane for them not to invest the effort.

Intel was doubly hindered here, because they wanted everything to use x86. Intel had trade secret and patent protections from competitors, and a critical mass of marketshare.

Parallel programming was something that had to fit into that "x86 for everything" mindset rather than being a separate/competing technology to x86. The company that pushed winmodems and software sound cards wasn't going to be able to lead the disruption there.