NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - If you build it, they will come -- pretty please?

That's the implicit message of a series of full-page ads Intel has been taking out in various business publications. You may have noticed one on the back of the New York Times business section on Tuesday (the same day Intel ended up announcing a earnings miss and job cuts to come).

In the ads, Intel assures nervous investors that Moore's Law (which asserts that semiconductor chips get exponentially speedier in perpetuity) is still in effect. Indeed, Intel brags that it will "soon" be able to "squeeze a billion transistors on a chip, which will help companies do more at a lower cost."

Maybe. Unfortunately, Moore's Law (named for company founder Gordon E. Moore) doesn't apply to earnings, as Intel's anemic second-quarter results demonstrated pretty clearly. Earnings came in two cents shy of analyst expectations -- which had already been lowered after the company's earnings warning in June. (For more on Intel's results, click here). In a tacit acknowledgment that chip demand is likely to remain weak for some time, the company also said it would be losing some 4,000 jobs.

I think Intel's ads are an even more telling symbol of the dilemma the company now faces. The backward logic of Intel's ads (that a supply of cheap new chips will ultimately create its own demand) is pretty much evident to virtually anyone using a PC these days: a more-than-ample supply of ever-faster, ever-cheaper chips hasn't actually inspired anyone to create massively popular processor-gobbling applications that Intel and other chipmakers hope will inspire a sudden rise in demand.

Sure, squeezing a billion transistors on a chip is pretty darn impressive, but you don't exactly need a 10 gigahertz processor to check your e-mail. The only people who hunger for ever faster PCs these days tend to be hard-core gamers and aspiring indie filmmakers attempting to edit feature films on their laptops in their dorm rooms.

Most business customers and consumer PC users remain in what US Bancorp Piper Jaffrey analyst Ashok Kumar calls "a perilously high state of satisfaction."

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Satisfied customers have made for a lot of dissatisfied Intel investors of late. The stock has fallen some 50 percent from its January highs -- and 30 percent from where it stood before it issued its earnings warning in early June. (Obviously, it's not the only chipmaker hurting; rival AMD, which has seen its stock skid more than 50 percent since January, issued its own warning in June.)

And while some (including Kumar) are convinced that Intel's recent troubles may mark the nadir for the stock, it's hard to see what might send PC chip demand moving smartly upwards again. "If Moore's Law continues in force," Kumar notes in a recent research note, "the performance of PC processors and the systems they power will continue to bound farther and farther ahead of what the vast majority of buyers need."

Unless, of course, Intel's researchers can come up with a secret formula to transform satisfied computer users into rabid game freaks. That might ultimately do a lot more for the PC industry than fitting a billion transistors on a chip.

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