There was a lot more to it than just the fab failures.

Full disclosure, never worked there, have shared many beers with fantastically interesting (and proudly deranged) hardware engineers and architects who did.

Intel had transitioned from an engineering company to a company of managers, spreadsheets, and economic forecasting. They completely stagnated from a technology perspective, not just in the fab but also in the actual design and implementation. A Core 2 Duo was basically their last gasp of real innovation- after that even the business class cpus were basically stuck at the same core counts, same thread architecture, same memory architecture. They were just slowly shaving minuscule IPC, increasing minuscule clock, and adding small amounts of cache… but from a Wall Street perspective they were still posting good profits since the market was cornered and so engineering cuts kept coming, despite staff and principal engineers leaving in droves and yelling that the end was nigh.

The basic fault was that they decided to build their engineering, economics, and strategies around Moore’s Law. The law that famously was a fun observation stupid people started taking seriously. ‘When will get 12nm, Johnson?’ ‘Forecasted for next Q2 boss!’ but, you know, without the fab architects actually having a clue how to get there without a moonshot project.

Ryzen was a rude awakening for a company that had become an MBA zombie, slowly shambling towards the next quarter. Since that moment they’ve decapitated basically their entire management suite. And of course replaced them all with new managers. But they actually have managed (heh) to play decent catch up on the engineering side. But as it goes in the industry, 6 years later is 7 years too late. It’s AMD’s game to lose now.