With Moore's Law seemingly breaking down (although we have been there several times before), and notwithstanding IBM's recent breakthrough, these challenges INTC is facing, specially in the semiconductr process where INTC's ability to shrink its die well ahead of competition and produce its CPUs cheaper, as well as able to run them at ever higher speeds, promise to make the chip fab process more even among its competitors, i.e. no longer the clear advantage it has historically enjoyed.

The continual deterioration of the PC segment is not helping at all, and there seems to be cracks that are appearing in the Data Center market for high end servers.

On a side note, INTC's delay of its next gen chips to late 2016 (I think that is what I heard), opens up a window for AMD to release theirs ahead, not that there is any gurantee AMD is going to manage it, but the window is nevertheless open.  AMD also has an good slate of product releases in the CPU, APU and GPU coming up in the mid term, if it does not manage to impress and gain design wins that lead to substantial sales traction, game could be over for AMD.  Stock is trading at $1.79, Wow!

This Barron's INTC article on the Fab Process outline both the challenges and opportunities INTC is facing, subscription required:

online.barrons.com/ar..._mag_h