[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...