>>286691243
Intel had their thumbs up their ass till a few months before zen was released where amd did a developer conference thing, closed doors going into detail about the architecture. 
some top people at intels engier side came out saying just one thing 'amd is more than competitive' and this is when they started trying to make a new uarch. 

this takes 5-6 years from scratch assuming no problems.

from there, you also have intel actually believing their marketing hype. intel was well ahead of the game with 14nm, but that took a while to come out, a bit to long, and 10nm was supposed to be as big a leap as amds process going from 14nm to 5nm would be, but they had to scale it back due to severe problems. 
intel thought they would have euv, but they didn't
their competitors were ahead, and moving forward, till globalfoundries pulled out of 7nm, they actually had 1 euv working and 3 more un assembled that they sold

Intel at this point in time is listening to partners on what to do, something they weren't doing before because they genuinely believe no one could touch them. 
amd is ahead of intel in ipc, but is lagging in clock speed
intel only has clock speed advantages on 14nm, moving to 10 will make it slower then 14, likely slower then 7nm, with near no benefit to go to, which is why intel is re organizing under 7nm, which while it will be a bit ahead of other 7nm nodes, it will never again be the "intel node advantage" 

Intel lost on competitive architects, and all intels attempts to move to a new uarch have failed (Itanium being among the most recent, pentium 4, being another one)
current intel chips are based on ibm patents for multicore, and pentium 3 uarch hacks, and the p3 uarch dates back to the pentium pro, so its what, a 25~ year old base they are working off of, and all their newer uarches have failed miserably?

intels not in a good spot, and zen 3 should close the gap in nearly every way where intel still has a slight advantage, with 4 dominating