That's fairly short-sighted, a 200B company shouldn't be protecting their core business by handing over their manufacturing reins to effectively create a monopoly that most of the world relies upon for chip manufacturing to make up for a 6 month delay, whilst still incurring the massive fixed costs of their existing fabs.

How much more secure would their business be if they're at the mercy of Monopoly supplier with no competition?

At least Apple's business is protected as they're a value-added supplier with a near impenetrable network monopoly to prevent competition, but most of Intel's business is chips, conceding manufacturing of them to a single supplier who's now worth nearly 2x Intel, who are big enough to buy ARM or merge with AMD seems unwise for their long-term prospects.

I didn't say they should hand all their manufacturing to TSMC.

Rather, if they have fallen behind on manufacturing (which they have) and decided that they need to access TSMC fabs (which they seem to have) then the priority should be x86 not Ponte Vecchio.

Why? Because whilst they are behind on process some firms have an bigger incentive to switch to ARM (eg Apple). Once they have gone to ARM they are much less likely to come back to Intel x86. If they can keep them away from ARM they have a chance of getting them back if/when they get their manufacturing back on track.

Either way conceding manufacturing of their flagship products to their competitor is not without consequence, and shouldn't be their primary preference - it's their contingency plan, as it should be.

Sure, their primary preference would be to use in-house, but their flagship products today are being built using either an old or a problematic process node and that's a big problem that is not going to get sorted in 6 months.

Reading the earnings call I think its reasonably clear that they will be going outside for at least some of their manufacturing - the 'contingency plan' is really around what happens if things get worse.