It is when your products are trailing competitors on both fronts (AMD and Nvidia) and are facing potential class action lawsuits over existing products (13th and 14th gen CPUs).
The thing is that this is a tiny amount in the grand scheme of things. It's been a while since I looked at the financials, but IIRC it was something like $33b per year of revenue, and $26b per year for R&D. Selling off ARM is something like a day's revenue, so it won't have been done just to raise a bit of cash, more just a recognition that it has nothing to do with their core business right now or their future plans.
From those approximate figures above (that I probably misremembered), personally I wouldn't worry too much about Intel short-term. They can get back to positive cash flow quite quickly by reducing the R&D expenditure quickly as long as they get over the PR headache of the current gen chips, and seemingly the new microcode is reducing peak voltage spike on single/two-thread loads. There's a lot of bad press right now, but the majority of business comes from data centres who probably weren't cranking all the overclocking levers and I'd guess any recalls will almost all be from the much smaller ultra-keen gamer segment.
Longer term, there's a risk if they cut the R&D spending too much and then find it hard to re-hire those engineers, but there's a good chance they'll get competitive again when they finally get their new process working, and that might be what they need to finally get their TDP levels back competitive with AMD again. It's worth watching the Asianometry video about backside power delivery - if they get this right, there's a very good chance of future Intel chips being more power efficient than AMD's.
