Some PR person at Intel is kicking themselves now.

Not necessarily, maybe they know it's time not to give the "tick" expectations anymore. They can be very soon away, and from their perspective, it's time to be identified with other aspects, not with "ticks."

Not even that, the question is if there will ever be more than one or two more "ticks" in the traditional sense. Apparently the sizes of the elements on the chips are roughly the same on Intel's 10nm and some other 7nm. As an example of what people in the field say: if nothing changes, at 5nm, 80% of the transistors would have to be "dark" (unpowered) all the time. EUV, often presented as the new solution in the processes, would also possibly be too expensive under 7nm even if it's still not even introduced.

So the "tweak-tweak" can become the major cycle soon on more levels.

The question is what "nothing changes" means, and whether that's a desktop context or not. If he means a chip with 10x as many transistors can only keep 2x active at the same power budget, that's not a big deal. Give me a physically smaller chip in my phone, and a bigger cooler on my desktop.

As far as I understand the issues with the current tech, it's not good enough that a chip only generates, say, 45 watts. You need to know that the dissipation is spread out enough in area+time to not overheat any individual components, which gets harder as the components get smaller.

"Tick-Tock-Tweak" is a great summary, so much easier than the "Process-Architecture-Optimization" label that Intel gave to explain their new plan.

Tick-Tock-Twerk

Tick. Tock. Tweet.

I like Tick-Tock-Punch personally, but it doesn't really matter. I wonder how long this next pattern will last? Probably not nearly as long as tick-tock.