I think the cooling could be a significant part of the picture here---you can nudge the power/frequency curve a bit with very aggressive cooling (phase-change is extremely aggressive) to drop the leakage power (e.g., as AMD did with the liquid cooled Fury X [1]).

If this had a different core count from the 8180 I would agree but I wouldn't expect Intel to do a completely separate design just for a model that will need to be highly binned regardless.

That or Intel has made some serious magic happen at 14nm++++++++++.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x...

> That or Intel has made some serious magic happen at 14nm++++++++++

will be interesting to watch what AMD is going to offer using their new 12nm toy. ;)

I'm more interested in Zen2 on 7nm which seems to be coming out earlier than Intels 10nm CPUs.

Possible IPC enhancements from architecture optimizations of Zen2 + better clocks = first time since over a decade that AMD beats Intel in single threaded workloads? Due to their better SMT implementation (?) they seem to beat Intel in multithreaded scenarios already with same core count and around the same clock (at least in Cinebench).

Yes, Zen2 will be very interesting to watch next year. The only problem is that AMD has not offered anything else other than some ppt presentation on how great is the Zen2.

12nm is not a substantial gain over 14nm.