Depending on which branch of the company you're talking of (fab design, chip design, ...), and based on what info you can actually get on it which is less fact

Depending on which branch of the company you're talking of (fab design, chip design, ...), and based on what info you can actually get on it which is less fact and more "large amount of anecdotical evidence", Intel's is between more and a lot of than 15% behind. And while I agree with your proposed first step of the solution, and the urgency to do it given the delay between that and any impact on results, their tendency to look only for short term gains and benefits will probably impede them. They've learned to love easy money, and they didn't need to really pay their people well because there was no serious competition, not in fab, not in chips. Now they're fallen behind on both, as easily predicted, but for a short while they extracted massive amount of money from their margin.