You have to give whomever came up with 14nm process. Despite being super old it's still somewhat competitive. It's crazy Intel can't fix their process. They make more cash than amd, nvida etc. They make more cash than tsmc.
https://fuse.wikichip.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iedm-20...
That being said they really need to step up their game or else they'll be bleeding market share for years to come.
Is it plausible that they wouldn’t be able to get 10nm to work, but would be able to make 7nm work? Or put differently, would abandoning 10nm be tantamount to abandoning the effort to develop a smaller process?
Intel somewhere along the line chose the wrong set of solutions to achieve their 10nm process.
IMO these mistakes will not necessarily mean that some other node will be inherently disadvantaged other than the fact that they may now find themselves scrambling for tech lead. They will still have learned a lot from 10nm and hopefully should be able to feed that into future density improvements.
Complicating it further, Intel made the same mistake over and over again-- they've been trying to get things back on track since roughly Sandy Bridge and have replaced their head designer every chip since that point when things didn't go well. Instead of fixing their design, they throw it out and start completely over. Again. and. Again.
It would require a miracle at the top to fix their decision process.
But when you're "close" to getting your 10nm fab working, it's hard to start a new design for 14nm. If their 7nm had shown up ready to go, that would have saved them, but it looks troubled too. Maybe they'll be able to work out the kinks faster on 7nm.
Maybe they'll design something out of character for Intel that works for the realities of their 10nm process; from what I can tell, their 10nm process is mobile only because it doesn't clock well, they could turn that into a less negative by doing a design they normally couldn't do because of the need for high clockspeeds. It may look copycat of M1, but something that's a lot wider might be viable with a 3Ghz clock target, but isn't viable for 5Ghz that Intel needs to hit on desktop chips.