It's not like 2000, where if you're behind a good run of fab research will rocket you forward with some sweet increases in clock frequency.

We're nearing the end of the road on node shrinks, Intel can best hope to be marginally ahead on process.

What Apple's M1 shows is that a fundamental redesign is needed to get gains. Intel's problems appear to be in design, software, and business execution.

But doing a new ISA or muscling into ARM or other radical things precisely require design/software/business execution or it will utterly fail.

M1 is going to open the floodgates for ARM on PCs. That's what will kill Intel.

AMD can probably pivot, I have faith in their designers.