[rowanG077]

Intel has faster tech in their pocket? 5 years ago I would have believed you. But they have seen the AMD zen architecture for years now and they can't meaningfully compete anymore. If they had tech ready to go they would have released it by now to crush AMD.

[temac]

I agree. 5 years ago Intel put Skylake out. This was what they had, and it was great; it was years ahead the competition. They did not have anything else secret even better and ready to go out, because that makes absolutely no sense: if you can crush the competition even more, just do it...

After that the story is well known: their microarch were tied to their node, and Intel's 10nm was a failure, and still is not up to what the competition is doing. They started to backport the next microarch to 14 too late IMO. They may release new ones on 14nm; or they may suddenly manage to strongly improve their 10nm (not likely, it is usually very gradual at this stage)

And it is again obvious that even in the last 3 years, they had nothing (on the microarch side that they could produce on their mainstream node) they were able to rush as a fallback to counteract Zen, otherwise why would they not have done it?

Now they are clearly behind on the process, and on the microarch Zen 2 is good enough and does not need to compete much against Sunny Cove, plus if Intel releases a backport of Sunny Cove for their 14nm it may be against Zen 3...