Does Rocketlake fare better than Haswell and Skylake did? I don't think so.
Well to some degree it does. IPC gains are up a decent amount. In the end it equals out. How much of this is to make up for 10nm's clock deficiancies, how much of it is because of how near perfect their 14nm process has become, how much of that is them actually avoiding on moving the needle forward. But it is finally a substantial increase in IPC.
Besides they NEEDED some of the gains. Thanks to Haswell we have laptops that last 8-10 hours now. Without that effort we would have been in the 5-7 hours range. How much worse would it have looked compared to ARM? Sure ARM laptops do better, but the 8-10 hour range is acceptable that you start worrying about other things, such as performance and compatibility.
Now don't get me wrong the needs were needed and Ryzen has been an example on how you can still take advantage of power efficiency on a Desktop chip. But they sacrificed a whole desktop generation to solidify using their notebook silicon for desktops. Lets not forget that Nahelem started out on what became the HDET platform. At some point Intel was thinking that they could have a desktop lineup and mobile lineup. When they got Clarksdale and Lynnfield going for mobile they decided they could make it a desktop chip as well and the seed was planted. They went HDET for any desktop dedicated chip as a base Xeon spin off and the general desktops would be mobile silicon. Haswell being the culmination of that. Broadwell capitalizing on the 14nm move. Its been great for laptops. Don't get me wrong. And needed. But of all the companies that can afford a couple more dies, creating a line of truly desktop dies for the general market it would be Intel. To top it off they did have those dies. The small Xeon die with its 6/8/and later 10 cores. Would have been a perfect desktop offering. Few lasers here and there (maybe keeping it on Dual channel, not offering the top core count) and they could have segmented it well enough. But no the desktop chips became laptop chips, just to create an even bigger rift and at least first keep the dies as small as possible. I am all for chasing margin. But Intel really milked their standing to create this sloth moving beast that they are now under true competition.
What about graphics? What if they stayed at the shoddy GMA X3000 level of performance and support? That chip had programmable vertex/pixel shaders but hardware T&L performance that was below their own Netburst chips. So the team refused to accept that the time has passed when you can offload graphics duties to CPU just to sell few more of them.
Wouldn't that be great if it was the reason? I mean they needed to upgrade it but Intel was busy drawing up Larrabee at the time. They new they needed better cores. But that is almost besides the point. I think they saw an option to kill of AMD who was basically only selling APU's at the time. So upping that was important. But also they wanted to keep the die size as small as possible and keep them more segmented from their server and HDET products. So they upped the graphics for that. Cept the Iris chips but requires its own packaging.
Apple and ilk may have accelerated some of the transition but it was inevitable.
Actually I think people would have been more accepting if they didn't stay at 4 cores for so long. Quad cores came with Kentsfield in 2007. Actually they announced quad core chips very shortly after Conroe. Then they stayed with 4 cores all the way until Coffeelake in 2018. 11 years and 4 process generations with the same quad core config! Early as Ivy Bridge they should have went with 6 cores.
Again the point isn't the needed moves. But all of Intels changes since Sandybridge were to make it a better laptop chip. I don't blame Intel for trying to make money and improve profits. But realistically it would have cost them a fraction of a fraction of something they would notice to keep a true desktop line that progressed faster, and would have made them a much harder target to hit. That being the point. The reall point of separation was there at Haswell. Intel had the opportunity to have Haswell stay mobile and bring in Haswell-E or an off shoot as the desktop chip and they worked on that, they wouldn't have been an easy target. Instead Broadwell comes out and they have to do more than a shrink but add to it just to fit the pin requirements and they just up the graphics cores.