Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and other such platitudes. Still, it seems like even back in 2005, some Intel executives could already see some of the future that Nvidia might be involved in. According to its sources, the New York Times reports that some Intel execs believed that the underlying design of its graphics chips might be important for future data centers, which today would count as a massive understatement.

Given some of the reveals here about Intel's corporate culture (and how it might have contributed to the almighty financial and strategic mess it currently finds itself in), it's perhaps no surprise that Intel was slow on the draw with this sort of future planning. Intel executives reportedly described the company as "the largest single-cell organism on the planet", a reference to the insular and single-minded corporate culture at the time.