Analysis With a major downturn in revenue and profitability over the past six months, Intel has some tough decisions ahead as it seeks to make billions of dollars in cuts while the beleaguered semiconductor giant tries to enact its grand comeback plan."We remain committed to optimizing our value creation efforts through portfolio honing; reallocation of resources to higher returns, higher-growth businesses; M&A; and, where applicable, divestitures," Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said on the company's third-quarter earnings call a week ago.Habana AI chips In December 2019, Intel made the seemingly hasty decision of paying $2 billion to acquire AI chip startup Habana Labs, just weeks after the company showed off fancy deep learning processors from a previous acquisition, Nervana Systems.- For its big comeback, Intel needs to spend money – and it's making less and less of it - After spate of delays, Intel promises Sapphire Rapids Xeons for early 2023 - The new GPU world order is beginning to take shape - Gelsinger takes ax to Intel after chip sales slump, profit nosedives Intel has positioned the Habana chips as more efficient alternatives to GPUs for large-scale AI training and inference, so if the processors can do their job, it may be worthwhile for Intel to hold onto for the long run.The x86 goliath only just started shipping its first Bitcoin-mining accelerator chip, the Blockscale ASIC, back in June, promising to provide an energy-efficient alternative to power-guzzling GPUs."