Their plan C was a complete fluke and only came together because the Israelis managed to put out Centrino. I don't think such a fluke is possible when we're at the limits of process design and everything takes tens of billions of dollars and half a decade of lead time to implement.

Having multiple competent design teams working on potentially competing products all the time is one of the strengths of Intel, I wouldn't call it a fluke.

Things do look dire right now, I agree.

I'm not that up on Intel at the moment. Why are they stuck at more iterations of the lake architecture with little changes?

What was the plan "A"?

Get 10nm out.

doesn't it look like they're shifting to do chiplets as well at the moment? copying AMD might be their plan C, but it won't help if AMD can steam ahead with TSMC 7nm while Intel is locked to 14nm for a couple of years. That's going to hurt a lot.

TSMC's 7nm and Intel's 14nm are about the same in actual dimensions on silicon IIRC. The names for the processes are mostly fluff.

AFAIK, supposedly TMSC 7nm and Intel 10nm are about equivalent, but with 10nm being in a limbo, TMSC is ahead now.

That’s also how I understand it, which seems to be supported by perf/watt numbers of Apple’s 2018 chips.