It depends what you mean by lost their way. But ATI has nothing to do with it. Bulldozer was a failure, it was a perfect storm of Intel's best execution since the Pentium 4 Ghz problem and AMD's worst execution. When Intel took a misstep, it cost them 20% of market shares. When AMD took a misstep, it nearly killed them. You could argue without ATI, AMD would properly be dead by now. And AMD CPU was literally uncompetitive even with price reduction for the past 5 years. And they totally miss the boat with the desktop to laptop transition. While Intel, after hitting the Powerwall with Pentium 4 and fortunate enough to have had a team working on a architecture specially for laptop, the original Pentium M, pick up speed in that direction.
But like others have pointed out, I believe it is a operational, internal struggle, and basically a leadership problem.
> And AMD CPU was literally uncompetitive even with price reduction for the past 5 years.
I don't know about that.
The Intel core are very good processors but the entry price for the smallest one is over $100.
I can remember some cheaper product lines from Intel but they weren't that great. AMD had decent CPU for the cheap laptops and computers. Dunno how much volume and margin there is to be done on that segment.
But like others have pointed out, I believe it is a operational, internal struggle, and basically a leadership problem.