What? Icelake cores are about twice as big as Zen2. Zen2 has more cache which drives transistor count up, but last level cache won't consume much power and won't take a lot of silicon space. Core logic does - and core's power usage is directly comparable how many transistors are switching.Since ice lake core has less transistors compared to zen2 yet higher IPC i'll take it with ridiculously compex both of you mean ridiculously good. And any modern CPU is "ridiculously complex" compared to an 8086.
As mentioned by OriAr getting 18% extra performance out of 38% extra transistors is an outstanding result.
Their 10nm process is broken, but their architecture certainly isnt. Very excited to see what they have in store with Willow and especially Golden Cove.
And it's different thing to get IPC up than get extra performance. Complex, big archs clocks lower than simpler ones so getting extra performance from extra complexity isn't guaranteed. And sure Icelake isn't bringing extra performance, specially multi-core performance is plain poor.