The market made it pretty clear that as long as Nvidia was increasing performance substantially with each release, they could collect a healthy margin of profit

The market made it pretty clear that as long as Nvidia was increasing performance substantially with each release, they could collect a healthy margin of profit. There was no incentive to artificially slow down their progress. (Additionally, the benefits of GPU power were clear to gamers, and new benefits from parallel processing units became apparent in the areas of cryptocurrency and machine learning.) Intel, however, ran into engineering issues with their process improvement, while having limited market-driven incentive to spend and innovate improvements to their efficiency (IPC) beyond a certain level (or to increase core count.) So their "tick-tock" cycle was broken.