Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel is more like 3 steps behind, one of their shoes is missing and the other is missing laces
Having lived inside similar but much smaller dramas, it smells to me like Intel is titrating bad news. There was a goal. The goal became PR. Someone in management began to believe the PR, and turned it into a promise, predicated on 'and then a miracle occurs' (the engineers figure out how to do some things that haven't been done before). The engineers keep trying to explain how nobody has done this before because you…
There's almost no useful public insider information about the actual state of Intel's next gen technologies. We only know what is actually shipping and promises in PR slides. Sometimes I wonder if they don't know much more inside the company. There's roadmaps, projects, timelines, factories, teams, project managers, middle managers etc. but nobody has a clear picture of what's actually necessary and what's going to work in time. Engineers overpromise on the timeline, managers misreport "minor" hangups and upper management is left in the dark until it's much too late to change horses. Then there's stories of the old guard of engineers leaving but the replacements aren't getting up to speed quickly. Management even needs to consider outsourcing production to other companies because their homegrown engineering failed them time and time again lately. I really hope the core of the company is still solid and they get their act together soon.