Meteor lake is a big step up in efficiency but will be a regression in performance. Another reason to cancel the desktop variant.
This means that Intel 4 is still not moving forward well enough, at least not as well as they had predicted at the start of the Meteor Lake project.
Hopefully for a healthy competition, this time they will succeed much faster to tune their manufacturing process.
It wasn't process problems that kept sapphire rapids from being released till now. 10nm/Intel 7 has been ramped up and fabbing products for over a year.
They are very late on critical products that are clearly not the fault of the foundry side. This is squarely on the design side.
Running good engineering orgs is hard, Intel's problems run deep and on many levels.
The original Sapphire had to be "redesigned" ( or reworked ) for Intel 7. You cant just take an high yield Intel 7 Golden Cove Core and "Edit" it with some extra features for server and then expect it yield.
Second being Intel 7 isn't exactly high yield either. At least not 14nm level. It is good enough for small die size chips, but it is something different for large die size ( Aka Sapphire Rapid ). Which is why the comparison between Intel and AMD on server market doesn't make sense. They have a very different economy of scale.
Third being Intel doesn't put resources in Intel 7 any more. It is no longer a priority. They are losing one way or another that is why they put everything into their next node Intel 4.
Intel is expecting Intel 3 in 2023 and products out in 2024, this isn't too far behind TSMC schedule.
All the other products that shipped on Intel 7 had to also be designed for the process. Intel was also late on arc, which wasn't even fabbed on Intel process nodes. Ponte Vecchio... Late late late.