> All their competitors are doing a lot more with a lot fewer people.

According to Wikipedia, for FY25:

Intel: 102,000 employees

AMD: 28,000 employees

Nvidia: 36,000 employees

I'm pretty sure the latter two have been growing headcount lately, and even then combined they still have fewer employees than Intel.

You need to add tsmcs employees to the amd and nvidia counts since intel is a foundry. +82k puts it around equal.

Now intel isn’t doing as well on the chip design side as amd or nvidia nor as well on the fab side as tsmc but i suspect that’s on leadership thrashing constantly like it is more than anything else.

Intel (100k +-) should be compared with AMD (28k) + TSMC (84k)