> Their manufacturing process for both 10nm and 7nm are now supposedly back on track, and yet they have a large backlog of designs waiting for the new processes

> Their manufacturing process for both 10nm and 7nm are now supposedly back on track, and yet they have a large backlog of designs waiting for the new processes to ramp up From what (little) I know of the industry this isn't a good sign. Engineers working on the fab processes and packaging have to work closely with designers throughout the product design cycle, repeatedly taping out variations to fit onto the process as it is built out. That's part of why Intel historically used the tick/tock design cycle, designing a new thing to be built on a new process has a multiplicative effect on the time to market because of the way the unknown-unknowns of both sides impact each other, and the large amount of specialized labor to mitigate everything. It doesn't help that they lost a ton of institutional knowledge over the last decade to their competitors through layoffs disproportionately hitting senior staff.