Intel have repeatedly blown a fortune on new chip architectures, often chasing what the world was assuring everyone would be the Next Big Thing. The iAPX 432 (hardware garbage collect, targeted at the likes of Ada), the i960 (RISC will own the world!), the i860, and so on.
The market has consistently told Intel that it wants more and more out of the x86 chip set. When Intel has ignored that, it has been punished, and punished harshly - most especially so when AMD gave the market an x86 64 bit architecture and Intel didn't. Why should Intel ignore decades of experience now?
I wouldn't say they have blown "fortunes" (with the exception of Itanium). For a long long time Intel was the dominant force in embedded microcontrollers as well. You may recall the 8051 architecture, still in use today which is in a bazillion products. That line flourished even when Intel was punished for its first 8086 "SOC" the 80186.
Intel has never learned the skill of serving multiple markets. Even when I was actively engaged with them in new designs they couldn't have the '64 bits in x86' discussion because that market was "owned" by the Itanium guys. There didn't seem to be any way to talk about x86 with those new features. I'm sure that was the same issue with SOCs. If I could advise them, that is the skill I would really want to work on, actionable listening to get ahead of their customers needs.
The interesting what-if question is if they would have made more if they had listened.