They can.Assuming they can ever get to, or past, 10nm, while actually providing a SUPPLY. Oh, who are we kidding. They can't even hit the supply margins on the much easier 14nm process, how do we expect them to reach 1.4nm in the next 10 years when they've been trying to get past 14nm for 5 years already.
They've perfectionized the 10nm process, but literally had no competition.
Then they had 1Bn dollar fine to pay to Nvidia over stuff...
Anyway, 10nm was the smallest regular lithography could go.
Now they're using the UHV process, which allows them to easily half the size; as AMD already has show on their 7nm (basically 14nm halved on a better laser).
All Intel got to do is swap out lasers. They got no real research to do, as they can now get ~3.5x more chips per wafer (with about 0.5x bad or lower binned chips).