When Apple/AMD were shipping Intel beating parts folks were quick to dismiss it as a byproduct of TSMC's process. Is intel's chip design so much worse that AMD can trounce them on a substantially worse process? Or is Intel 10nm just not very good.
The 10 nm Intel Ice Lake Server has much worse perf/W than the 7 nm Epyc made by TSMC, and this is what matters.
That means that at the same power limit and the same number of active cores the Ice Lake Server clock frequency is much lower, or at the same clock frequency and same number of active cores the power consumption of Ice Lake Server is much higher.
The SuperFin 10 nm process used by Tiger Lake allows much higher maximum clock frequencies, up to 5.0 GHz, than the Ice Lake Server 10 nm process, and it also has a better perf/W, but even the SuperFin 10 nm does not reach the perf/W of the 7 nm TSMC process.
If the previous claims made by Intel are true, the process used for Alder Lake, now renamed "Intel 7" will be the first Intel process that is better in perf/W than the 7 nm TSMC process.
Nevertheless, it will be still worse than the "5 nm" process that has been used by TSMC in high volume products (Apple) for more than a year.
Tiger Lake H closed the gap, it seems. The 11980HK is competitive with 5900HX.
Also, the first Alder Lake benchmarks on QS chips suggest it's faster than Ryzen 5950x. I believe the competition will be fierce from now on.