I've lost count how many misguided bids of taking x86 to low-power they made. Also the apparent unshakeable confidence that ARM will never become viable on server and desktop.

In this context the Gelsinger video clip in the article is fascinating. Sometimes companies fixate on one element of their strategy that has worked in the past.

It seems that Intel had ‘always make x86 / backwards compatible’ as their fixation.

Intel was making its own ARM chips called Xscale 20 years ago, no?

Indeed and XScale was successor to StrongARM which I think was highest performing Arm design for a while.

Sold to Marvell in 2006 right before the iPhone appeared.

Intel then spent billions trying to make x86 commercially viable on mobile.

Intel tried to make Arm SoCs. But their customer management sucked, so in the end they only manufactured the SoCs that they designed, and didn't sell enough of them to be sustainable.

Also perhaps there's a role where software/architecture just got better - they didn't have LLVM or other forms of code translation (if I'm phrasing that right) back then which seems to make the cpu architecture less of a critical issue.