Yes that is true. But as you wrote they are squeezing Sunny Cove into 14nm so they could have done it 3 years ago if they had a little foresight. Even at the expense of overall clocks they would be in a better place today with a more efficient architecture even if it were at lower clocks.Neither of those architectures was designed for 14nm. They need both needed the increase in xtor density and power reduction to effectively replace Skylake. Rocket Lake is so late because the engineers had to figure out how to squeeze a modified *Cove architecture onto 14nm dice.
They have repeated all of the bad decisions they made with the P4 all over again. Now they have to dig out of that hole. Except this time they don't have a "Core" analog in their back pocket, AMD is all over them, and Apple is in the game along with ARM. Now we'll see what Intel is really made of.
On another thought I don't know if AMD's 7nm parts can all core up to a continuous 4+GHz as reported by HWinfo's Average Effective Clock report.
Can someone with an AMD 7nm part turbo up all cores to 90%+ "Total CPU Usage" (HWinfo) for a few minutes and report "Average Effective Clock?" Also from HWinfo.
I'm starting to think the transistor density is too much at 7nm for all core sustained speeds of 4GHz as reported by HWinfo's Average Effective Clock. We've seen Comet Lake load 10 cores to 4950MHz Average Effective Clock so that's why I'm curious. Something is going on here.