Intel was founded in '68. They've been around since the inception of the integrated circuit. Their war chest of patents and dollars and assets/resources aka foundries, is helpful in soaking up damage from bad calls in a way that no one else can match.

AMD could never made the same gamble as Intel did for Itanium. There's a long technical argument as to whether the world is better off in a technical CPU design sense because of that, but I disagree that it's necessarily good management of Intel that's allowed it to recover from disaster.

The best management can play the hand they're dealt perfectly and still lose. However bad management can play the best hand poorly and still win.