Technical debt is a real thing, as any IT manager, programmer, system administrator or SRE, or end user will tell you. If you save money in the short run by not keeping up, you always end up paying with interest when you are backed into a place where you do have to catch up. Or, you go out of business.

So it is with Intel, which has come perilously close to irrelevancy in such a short time through a mix of foolishness, arrogance, and honest mistakes.
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But what Gelsinger knows, and what his replacement Lip-Bu Tan knows, is that manufacturing knowledge in the chip business is cumulative. You can’t skip steps. You have to stand on them – or, if you trip, as Intel has done, try to land on the one after the one you skipped by accident. [...]