Spokeshave -
As SOI was AMD's "hail mary", so will strained silicon be Intel's "hail mary".
Hardly. Intel is not going broke. Intel had an SOI process 3 or 4 years ago that I was aware of and Intel chose to go another route. Intel develops their own process technology and I expect that they have made the right decision for 90nm. People claimed that Intel was having problems with .13u but never provided any evidence to support that. We'll probably see the same round of claims again and you're just getting a head start. I already turned out to be right, as I always do, but you have to wait a long time to see how you fair.