As an outsider, that isn't what I see. AMD has bought most of its core technology rather than designing it from scratch. The K6 was from NexGen, the bus from DEC (Socket A, HyperTransport), the Athlon was a great traditional design (P6/Alpha/PowerPC-like in ideas), the memory controller experience came from Alpha hires, their embedded chip is based on Cyrix's, etc. AMD has been quite good at taking proven ideas and implementing them for the mass market with a lot of success. The primary innovations they are given credit for is the memory controller on x86 (first done Transmetta Crusoe), HyperTransport (DEC), and multi-core (IBM Power).

Intel always seemed to be an innovative company that heavily funds R&D, but can have utter flops by not being pragmatic enough to drop a bad design. While they fail badly, the ideas are usually quite unique and I'm sure educational. The fact that they recover rather than repeatedly making bad calls (e.g. Sun) shows that they are resilliant. Having the different design teams probably helps to both recover from a flop and not corrupt creativity by allowing groups to go into different directions. As you indicate, though, there are only so many good ideas and the duplication has to be extremely frustrating.

So I'm not sure if Intel's approach is bad and they tend to be more innovative than AMD. Its costly, though, and as a consumer I've happily gone with AMD/Cyrix/etc when Intel pushes a flop chip.

Sorry, it's "Algorithm Design Manual" by Skiena (2008).

Then you might like "Algorithm Design" (2008). Its a superior, imno, but has slightly less coverage with better depth. My personal favorite algorithm book is "The Art of Multiprocessor Programming".