Feels like Microsoft during the Balmer years. Instead of Linux and Mac ascendant, you have AMD and ARM... it doesn’t seem impossible to think a Satya Nadella could turn things around.
Realistically, Intel only have to get one process node right to either be right back in the game or buy themselves years more time to play with. They are currently somewhere between 3-5 times behind TSMC lithographically, but nowhere near that far behind in raw performance, which suggests that they could at very least knock AMD off their perch in single-threaded work. Obviously process nodes are much harder than pret…
No they aren't. The nanometer names are only kinda comparable within a single company, but they are not comparable beyond that.
It's like saying that Chrome is 6x further ahead than Safari because Chrome is on 87 and Safari is only on 14. Same thing with fabs here, it's just a version number that counts down and has been for a long while.
In this case specifically, Intel's 10nm is more or less the same density as TSMC's 7nm. TSMC's 5nm is then a significant 1.8x the density of their 7nm process, so right now Intel's fabs are ~identical to what AMD is using (7nm), but Apple's use of TSMC's 5nm then puts them a generation ahead. TSMC is leading, but by a single generation not by 3-5x or whatever. Or to put it in year terms TSMC is about 2 years ahead of Intel right now, Intel just now getting "volume" 10nm up & running while TSMC was at a comparable node in volume 2 years ago.
As far as "performance" goes, though, so far TSMC, even their 5nm process, cannot quite match Intel. Remember that as far as the fab goes, performance is just what clock speeds can be hit, and Intel's clocks are the highest - they have the fastest transistors. 14nm+++++ is a meme/joke, but the actual transistor speed of it is still downright impressive. How fast a CPU actually runs depends on the architecture, though, which is influenced by density but in terms of pure single-core performance that's really almost entirely just architecture.