Dishonesty aside, this hits like a ton of bricks: FOUR YEARS to leadership. Even with Moore's law slowing, that is a loooong time. I remember when Intel had seemingly a two year lead in process, around 65nm I think.

And now, project four years to leadership, and assuming the economics and competition won't respond.

If Moore's Law hits a major wall (it has to ... sometime, right?), then that may be the catch-up.

It won't even be leadership. TSMC 3nm is about equivalent to Intel 20A, and is hitting risk production by the end of this year.

It reads to me as sugarcoating the admission that they're continuing to fall behind.

It is not clear at all that these games work. In April SemiAccurate already warned:

Intel should not rename their processes

Analysis: An unwinnable fight should not be picked

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2021/04/07/intel-should-not-ren...

Intel is moving to GAA on 20A. TSMC is moving to GAA on N2. Just to put that into perspective

4 years is an acceptable timeline. We are not taking about software product roadmaps here. If you consider the amount of time and time and effort it took apple, amazon to come out just with chip designs, this is reasonable. While its true that tsmc “3, 4 nm” are ok track for 2022.. its debatable if that naming means what it actually implies. Also tsmc had priority access to euv solutions this time around.. lets wait and see if Intel can deliver before passing judgement outright.

Yeah, it’s dishonest, but the consumers of their processors most often look at benchmarks, not nm width. The only people this might actually fool will be casual stock traders.

Yeah, I don't blame them that much when tech news always had to be "TSMC 5nm.. essentially equivalent to Intel 7nm" when talking nodes. The numbers have been made up for a while (even on the Intel side).

Some of those numbers are very curious though. Intel has historically had an issue with managers gaming bonus structures and some of this reeks of that too. "We're totally shipping Intel 7 this year (because it's what was 10nm+)"

how is it dishonest? the numbers are basically arbitrary anyway (the only metric even close to these figures is fin width, which is not really a metric of primary interest), and they've chosen to realign to numbers that more closely match comparable TSMC nodes and acknowledge that it doesn't really measure anything by dropping the 'nanometer'.

Well, they didn't align with TSMC. They end up jumping ahead of TSMC by a node.