Investors are starting to lose patience with Intel Corp.'s inability to keep up with contract chip manufacturers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.

While Intel's revenue, sales and dominant market share keep it at the top of any list of competitors, rivals including NVIDIA Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. — both of which design chips but outsource production — have shown much faster growth in share price and market capitalization in recent years.

Nvidia grew its market capitalization from about $11 billion in early 2015 to more than $200 billion in July, recently surpassing Intel, which has been considered the world's largest chipmaker for decades. AMD's value remains less than half that of Intel or Nvidia, but its market capitalization has also skyrocketed in recent years. AMD's value is up 550% since it announced its shift to a next-generation 7-nanometer chip process in July 2018, for example, even as Intel announced further delays to its 10-nm chip.

Both Nvidia and AMD saw the price of their shares rise more than 2,000% during the past five years, while the price of Intel shares rose 31.5%.

Intel has struggled to get its manufacturing capability up to speed, first in its transition to 14-nm chips in August 2014 and more recently during its five-year effort to make 10-nm chips, which began shipping in August 2019. Amid the delays, Intel burned away a five-year lead in technology development, allowing rivals such as AMD and Nvidia to take share in critical data-center and desktop markets, according to Stacy Rasgon, managing director and senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC.

That divide will widen even further when TSMC shifts to 5-nm chips later this year, as Intel continues to struggle with refining its 7-nm process.

Equipment manufacturers and cloud providers normally might buy a few AMD chips while holding out for Intel, "because you'd know Intel will come back with something competitive," according to Paul Teich, principal analyst at market-research firm Liftr Insight.

But with Intel's latest update on its development process, analysts said many are losing that confidence.

"The problem is, listening to Intel's story, I have no idea what this company looks like in three years," said Bernstein's Rasgon. "I don't even feel like they know or that they have a plan. I think they know there is a problem, but it seems as if they don't have a plan of record to try to fix it."

Intel is considering using a third-party foundry to help it catch up on moving to a 7-nm process, but only if continued manufacturing problems or delays in its in-house effort make the choice unavoidable, said CEO Bob Swan during the company's July 23 earnings call.

In the meantime, Intel will focus on squeezing as much additional performance out of 10-nm chips as it would have gotten by switching to a smaller-sized node, Swan said. He noted that the company used a similar strategy with its 14-nm designs while the 10-nm project was in development. Overall, Swan told analysts he "feels good" about the company's current roadmap through 2022.