Not clear what IBM doing 7nm means, really. They no longer own a foundry, and don't have any chips in normal products that compete with Intel. IBM also demonstrated some really high clock speeds previously, but the Power8 is still a 4GHz part and is built on 22nm.

Now, if Global Foundry actually starts making full 14nm chips this year (which it doesn't sound like it, seems to be a 20nm back end), that might things pretty interesting.

I previously worked for a company that used both TSMC and UMC, the jump to the next process level is always extremely hard, and the biggest deal is yield. Until the yields are high enough to actually get to a profit a lot of companies with specialized chips will stick to the older process (set-top box chips for instance) where it's good enough.

FD: I'm at Intel (not hardware), cannot comment on Intel itself.