I strongly believe this is going to allow Intel to make a dramatic comeback. It will buy them enough time to catch up while everyone is stuck buying Intel still as a result of supply constraint.
TSMC pulled ahead, but they don't have a lot of runway to pull far ahead. Likewise Intel can catch up, but they can't retake the kind of lead they had a decade ago.
Semiconductors are turning into commodities, basically.
For the next 2 shrinks at least TSMC disagrees.
According to roadmap of TSMC they are roling out 3nm risk production this year and they built a new research lab for 2nm last year and already picked a site for the new 2nm fab (Hsinchu, Taiwan). Beyond that I don't think anyone has any real plans (yet).
From single-core performance and low core count, Intel appears to be the better choice.
I've raised the question of the Enterprise DB version of Postgres (because of the PL/SQL emulation, which would certainly be needed). Even this change would be a large engineering effort.
That aside, there's a -huge- market for chips that aren't the latest and greatest. Intel expanding into that, which if I read right is what they're doing, could be a huge moneymaker.
Six years ago, in 2015, Intel had no problems to introduce the smaller Skylake U and the larger Skylake H at the same time.
Now, Intel needs more than half of year to increase the yields of 10 nm SuperFin enough to be able to introduce the larger Tiger Lake H after the smaller Tiger Lake U introduced last year.
This happens even if now the area difference between Tiger Lake H and Tiger Lake U is not so great as in the previous generations, because a good part of the twice larger CPU is compensated by the 3 times smaller GPU.
On the other hand, the previous variant of the Intel 10 nm process (non-SuperFin), which is still used for Ice Lake Server, has much worse electrical properties than the TSMC 7 nm, because at the same number of active cores and the same power consumption AMD Epyc 7xx3 can have a clock frequency up to 50% higher.
Moreover, the similar density of the Intel process means absolutely nothing when the competition using the TSMC process can deliver a more than 3 times greater L3 cache memory at the same price and in the same package size.
The density does not have any importance if you cannot deliver more transistors in a given package, because you cannot manufacture large enough chips and because you have been unable to predict that you will never be able to manufacture large enough chips, so that you should have designed from the beginning your product as multi-chip.
Try running two 4k external monitors on a Haswell MBP.
They look about the same, but a Haswell MBP13 (Late 2013) is very much less capable than an Ice Lake MBP13 (2020). Not all of that difference is attributable to the CPU I suppose, but the graphics and thermal throttling under load certainly are.
ASML has a market cap of 223 billion $, and their stock value has doubled in a year. That's a lot of growth...
Did I mention that Intel Xe uses TSMC as well?