Intel's battle for relevance

Intel has released its mid-year diversity numbers, which show only slight changes from late 2015 despite the tech company's 300 million to drastically change the makeup of its workforce. The company that arguably started and dominated the intelligent devices market for decades now finds itself in the role of an underdog, just as we're entering an era when the number of smart, computing-capable, connected things is exploding all around us. But that's exactly the position that Silicon Valley stalwart Intel finds itself in on the eve of its big annual Intel Developer Forum (IDF), being held in San Francisco this week. Intel's long-term strength, of course, has been providing the vast majority of the computing brains (the CPU) for the PC market. After several years of declining PC shipments, however, that legacy advantage has turned into a disadvantage, even despite signs that commercial PC shipments could be on the rebound.