But as we can see there are diminishing returns because if you combine Intels and NV R&D to AMDs which competes with both, we can only say that AMD is very, very efficient. Because they have to be.
if corporations get large and get too comfortable, inefficiency will rise astronomically. In that R&D cost you have all the cost including non-technical people like project managers and as usually in large corps tons of in essence not really needed manager and coordinator positions. The company (10k+ employees) I work for is market leader world-wide in the specific niche. Yet the daily inefficiencies I face are astounding. It makes we wonder WTF our competitors are doing as they clearly need to be even less efficient. In fact in many cases less people / employees would lead to more stuff getting done: less interruptions, less meetings, less bean-counters,...It's scary how inefficient these orgs are and that's why it is for me not all that surprising AMD can keep up. They shed all that dead weight because they had to.
EDIT: It also means intel isn't doomed due to the threat of AMD and ARM. They can and will have to adjust as well. Their revenue might go down a bit while their expenses will go down a lot when they start shedding dead weight.