>What on earth makes you believe this is a possibility given their last 10 years?

You mean the 10 years prior to Pat? Since his arrival he plan of 5 node in 4 years has been executing well so far. The last node in that plan is 18A.

Executing so well that they’re fabbing basically all of their current products at their biggest competitor TSMC instead of their own fabs? That doesn’t really scream successful execution to me…

As you said, 18A is the last node of that plan, so by now if they were executing well on those nodes they should be fabbing all their products on the Intel 3 and 20A processes but they’re not. In fact they don’t even have a 20A process to use because they cancelled it, so clearly that wasn’t executed well.

Intel made a strategic error in adopting EUV later than Samsung and TSMC, but they've always had good fabs. All the (non-fake) news about 18a seems to point to them being able to deliver in 2025.

This is the biggest thing that gives me some hope. The issue was they were trying to execute on old technology that was never going to scale smaller. This was a huge strategic blunder by leadership, but does not mean that the rank and file cannot execute when given the proper tools.

And that is the big IF. Depending on who you believe 18a is either doomed or right on track. I think if they can launch shipping products that consumers can actually buy on 18a in 2025 it is a huge win. If not, well, Intel is for a lot more pain.