My understanding is Intel's rivals also took a more incremental development process, which basically allowed them to capitalize on Intel's missteps.
That's some serious spin there. The chatter has been that Intel has had poor focus, poor working conditions, poor investments, poor communication within the company and a plethora of hubris. They need a culture overhaul and that seems to be what's happening. The jury is out to where they take this. I would bet on their competitors at this point.
that's a completely uninformed take on the topic. This is like betting on Airbus because Boeing has problems with the 737 - when the reality is there is no circumstance whatsoever where the federal government would allow Boeing to go under.
Intel is already being propped up with some sweet gigs doing supercomputer stuff for the National Labs (that their actual hardware probably does not justify on the merits - much like the national labs throw AMD a bone with CDNA in the GPU compute market) and a bunch of R&D tax cuts. The US also negotiated their way into a TSMC gigafab as a fallback strategy but they very much would prefer the American fab company makes it through as well, and they'll spend the cash to make it happen.
It's far cheaper and faster to get the existing competitor back up to speed, than to build a new foundry company from scratch, or even to just build a TSMC gigafab.
Their competitors also aren't american companies. GloFo is controlled by UAE investors. TSMC is controlled by Taiwan. Samsung is controlled by a Korean chaebol. AMD and Apple are fabless companies. Intel is the only US company still designing chips and producing them at a US foundry on any kind of a competitive level in the performance computing market.
The Israel parts of Intel had essential roles for decades, both in CPU design and in manufacturing, so it is very unlikely that there exists any Intel IP or know-how to which Israel does not have complete access.
The main difference is that Israel is considered as an ally.
7,4,3,20A in 4 years.
I think you're saying that the incremental half nodes steps are a more conservative approach?
TSMC pioneered the half node step, and it was very successful. So yes, I think copying successful strategy is a conservative approach.