Intel's only path forward is to shamelessly copy AMD and go chiplet, find a great interconnect and glue the whole thing together. Its also their only way out of the 14nm problem while maintaining a performance per core lead - IF they keep their Core ideas intact. Sprinkle some minor improvements on top from the already announced architectures and voila.
But yeah, they have tons of work. Their turbo is inferior to AMD's XFR and other tech, power draw is only going up, chips are too complex... And they even had to adjust ring bus to mesh and now use both out of necessity on different product lines. Meanwhile, Zen is the same, top to bottom, completely scalable and even those CCX's help seed the entire product stack.
That's my take and prediction as well. Intel is trying to find a way to not lose face and skip as much of 10nm as possible. Roadmaps were already adjusted, but we'll see another round of that. If you see what their current crop of 10nm can do, its nothing earth shattering in any way shape or form. And their other announced architectures... when a CPU engineer no longer talks about raw performance but rather about IGPs and optimizing for 'Creators' and all, you know they haven't got a thing to offer.
Your comment makes me laugh.
Shamelessly copy ? Ever seen Intel Core 2 Exteme QX6850 from 2007, Kentsfield and even in 2010 with Clarksdae. Guess not lol, And hit Anandtech piece on this same processor and see what AMD called Intel as fake LOL during Phenom days.
AMD Ryzen CPUs use MCM because their WSA and R&D budget and how cheap it is (Intel also did the MCM due to same reason) vs Monolithic Nonpureplay Foundry like Intel. Foveros is coming and also EMIB came into KBL G CPU as well. This is not new thing lmao and how HBM failed hard and fell flat for Consumer (Ofc Vega/GCN needed it to scale and we know RVII EOL)
Intel stagnated due to no competition and they milked the whole world, Still do (CSL X Server a.k.a Cooper Lake glued server processor) and their 10nm went too aggressive and also BK as CEO failed. And their Knights Landing also failed but that socket lives !
Zen2 has DRAM latency but their high Cache and Intel IPC catchup helped them with their brilliant Ryzen 3000 series. And 14nm or not it beats 7nm still with what ? A 4 year old microarch, Zen+ was Haswell and what happened with 8C/16T 2700 vs a 7700K (Massacre happened). Turbo is inferior ? What ? XFR is completely pushing the edge of thay stupid Low power 7nm TSMC node (Made for Apple since they arr primary for CapEx funding and ARM) thank god Ngreedia went with HPP 7nm Samsung node and not suffer from same crap off inferior 7nm node. So yeah back to Turbo, Intel PL2 set to max. There you go Max clocks on all cores without any Junk of PPT, PBO, XFR2 marketing drama (Watch GN on this if you did not).
Intel processors also are made to be scalabale if you are not under a rock LCC, HCC (HEDT), XCC (Xeon) until SKL X because they switched HEDT to XCC due to AMD closing in as their 10nm failures, since their uArch is coupled with node. So yeah the uArch scales here while Cores are not scaled like AMD.
AMD recycles their cores off this MCM due to WSA as it helps keeping budget off CCD at 7nm and I/O chip of decoupling Northbridge at 14nm GoFlo (EPYC Rome, where as 12nm for Ryzen Matisse)
And finally Intel is still raking profits due to DC arena where adoption rate is slower when you bring in a new competetor esp given how NUMA Ryzen 2000 to non NUMA Ryzen 3000 uArchs came. While Monolithic Intel still didn't had to change the programming much.
Iris Plus IGP has advantage over existing AMD APUs consider it getting tougher only not simple when you count Intel's massive R&D. And finally Apple AirPods profit is higher than AMD at gross $5Billion.
To conclude consumer wins when competition arrives like this (9980XE ST and Gaming was good and comparable to 9900K, 10K CSL X will improve at the cost of power but if people buy what to lose, more lanes more options better pricing all win) and shakes up the incumbent. So stop frothing over corporates