Yeah exactly. I want to be clear, I've got a tremendous amount of respect for Sophie Wilson; she's a much better engineer and more connected to how the industry is going. Her statements simply require a lot more caveats than they are normally given. It's more about the much the changing position of ARM and TSMC in the market place than anything else.
> At the same time, AFAIK Intel was doing quite well at 14nm finfet even then (likely better than any other foundry?), but that production capacity was not available to ARM, so I guess it didn't count.
Yeah, and Intel was right in the middle of their biggest misstep. Intel 10nm was in risk production for Cannon Lake with awful yields and therefore a huge $/transistor. It got shipped anyway as one SKU in May of 2018 that didn't make financial sense (there's rumors that management bonuses were tied to that release), before being relegated to process improvements for years until just recently.
It would have been fair for her to extrapolate a trend there that actually ended up being more complex in hindsight.
At the same time, AFAIK Intel was doing quite well at 14nm finfet even then (likely better than any other foundry?), but that production capacity was not available to ARM, so I guess it didn't count.