Under Intel’s original guidance, the firm should’ve been shipping 14nm CPUs by now — but the PC market slowdown and reported yield problems on its 14nm products led to a delay and a moratorium on new fab deployments. Now Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, has formally given guidance on when to expect the processors. In a statement to Reuters, Krzanich said, “I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday… Back to school – that’s a tight one. Back to school you have to really have it on-shelf in July, August. That’s going to be tough.”

The implication here is that Intel’s 14nm ramp up has gone more slowly than anticipated, but that the company is now on track. Hitting the profitable back-to-school segment would be ideal, but in order to do so Intel would need to be in volume production essentially now — notebook vendors will soon be validating the systems they’ll ship in the July/August time frame, if they aren’t already.

Intel hasn’t walked back any of the claims it made concerning 14nm last year, but it’s definitely taken some PR hits from rivals like TSMC, who have moved to trumpet their own successful ramps in the wake of Intel’s delay while GlobalFoundries and Samsung are talking up their own 14nm joint deployment. This delay will give TSMC, Samsung, and GlobalFoundries an opportunity to shrink the gap between themselves and Intel on process technology, if they can keep their own plans on track. Intel’s 14nm delay to Q4 2014 means that while it’ll still have a full node advantage against its rivals, the implementation gap will have fallen from 24 months to something closer to 18 months.

Will 14nm give Intel a lead?

In the x86 space, Broadwell is expected to offer a modest improvement to Haswell’s power consumption with a significant GPU update coming along for the ride. Intel’s large 128MB L4 cache is expected to drop into more mobile systems and debut on desktop as well, in at least some SKUs. The mobile space is somewhat more interesting for our purposes — while Bay Trail is a huge improvement over Clover Trail, Apple’s A7 is an extremely potent competitor for Intel’s x86 efforts and the lack of an integrated radio has hurt Intel in the mainstream and value mobile segments where its x86 processors might compete effectively. Qualcomm continues to dominate the Android space and has an aggressive roadmap planned for its own products.

Intel’s upcoming Cherry Trail is expected to address performance issues on the GPU side of the equation, with eight EUs based on Haswell’s GPU rather than the four EUs based on Ivy Bridge that Bay Trail uses. CPU design and clock speeds will be similar to BT — Cherry Trail will have a higher boost clock and significantly more memory bandwidth, but it’ll use the same Bay Trail architecture. Then, later in 2014, Intel will launch Braswell, its new Atom architecture. Intel has been extremely vague about what Braswell will offer, but it’ll need to be more than incrementally faster than BT to compete with ARM in the high-end mobile space.

And for Intel, that high-end space is vital. With its radios still built off-die, the company has to persuade tablet vendors to create products that use multiple chips. Tablet margins aren’t anywhere near as high as conventional desktop parts, but that simply makes it even more critical to grab what margins do exist. Bay Trail was a huge improvement over the old Atom core, but Intel will need to deliver another 30-50% performance increase if it wants to tangle with Apple and Qualcomm for top-end market share.