No. This timeline shows incompetence, not sitting on their hands: https://mdsattacks.com/#ng-full-story

Incompetence as in "they're incompetent engineers", and if so, compared to what baseline?

Or incompetence in as "they weren't capable of doing it"?

The latter is very probable. The former could underestimate the difficulty of such fixes...

The two statements are identical, competence is always within a given context.

It's precisely because "competence is always within a given context" that the two statements are not identical.

Incompetent can mean "as to the particular project context" (i.e. they could be great engineers that din't manage to deliver the fixes for this issue), or "as to their general professional capacity" (i.e. they are lesser engineers).

Fair point. I read both statements in the context of the particular hardware bugs Intel's trying to fix, but I can see how my comment is quite vague.

No, the second is "incapable" and suggests that even a "great" engineer could not have done it. The first one says that a "competent" engineer could have.

Big difference.

A great engineer can still be incompetent in the face of a difficult (or poorly specced) task.