You ask: "Why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_ than the 10 seri

You ask: "Why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_ than the 10 series chips?" My understanding from the article is that the answer to that question is that Intel is unable to produce any quantity of chips at 10nm that makes (enough) money. The author surmises that rather than go a year with AMD essentially unchallenged in the market, Intel back ported a 10nm chip to a process that they have better margins on 14nm, so that they could tout "improvements" on an architectural basis while skipping over the question of improvements on a system basis. For me, what is most telling is the 500 series chip set which seems uncharacteristic. From a purely speculative point of view (that is code for pulling a wild ass guess out of my butt here) I could see this as having been the design they had done for Apple's next generation Macbooks before they lost to Apples' A14x chip. The factors that lead me to that guess are that it really looks like a 'point' product (specific changes, not a general set of family changes) to me that doesn't fit into thee PC ecosystem as well as other chip introductions (like IceLake) did with respect to their overall roadmap.