US Intel

To be honest, regardless of the government involvement or not, I have little hope for intel. Maybe they can, over time, have an AMD-esque comeback, but given their track record of the past few years I'm not hopeful.

The Pentium -> Core2Duo was a great era for intel, but I feel like ever since then they've started a decline in both price/value proposition as well as just general hardware.

The i-series was arguably pretty good for gaming, but then they started exploiting that position by having relatively poor price-to-performance, thinking they wouldn't have any competition.. and they kept the 'we are winning' mindset even while AMD was hot on their heels.

And Core was a lucky happenstance for Intel as they were not innovating at all and fell behind, thank goodness their isreal lab was doing something other than P4 work.

Even recently, we've seen that all intel can do is increase cores and increase power consumption, and they still can't compete. This is itanium all over again, because that is how intel functions.