Also they did that netburst stuff that was a bad idea, and let AMD beat them to the punch on integrated memory controller… So many scenarios where Intel flubbed the “big change”.

However they have frequently been good on the little stuff. For a long time they had a fab advantage (and have messed that up for a decade now). There are decent at dotting the "I"s and crossing the ts, including broader software and firmware enablement.

Nowadays the only software people care about is CUDA and AMD actually has cash to take care of a lot of little things. Intel kept trying to make side efforts happen, like having a rack of memory and processors freely associated in ways no one ever asked for, phase change memory which while cool, was an awkward in-between NAND and SDRAM, various FPGA efforts which they never really figured out the actual point, putting an infiniband variant in the processor package in an awkward way that just made things worse, and a ton of weird accelerator architectures they abandoned within a couple years each time…

The tests never explicitly directly measured race nor required the voters name. They can design the tests to discriminate all sorts of ways based on the content.