Of course they are competitive. Look at benchmarks for AMD on TSMC and Intel. They are pretty close, close enough to be worth consideration both for consumer and b2b even today in 2024.

Just because they are second place, doesn't mean they have lost the race.

You really have 3 cutting edge players in fabrication. TSMC who is the best by a significant margin, and Intel/Samsung. TSMC is certainly winning right now, but they have not "won."

If Intel doesn't choke on its debt payments or corporate culture in the next 3-5 years, they will have one shot at pulling the nose up out of their dive. Of course their altitude is low enough that if they fail to execute in even a small way they will hit the ground.

Intel is behind TSMC by maybe a year or two at most. Both TSMC and Intel are shipping products fabricated on 3nm-class fabrication today, but according to Intel's own slides they while they are roughly competitive on performance/watt, they are still behind on density and cost.