Golden Cove (Alder Lake) has been a massive uplift in performance-per-clock from the previous generations. This is also related to the fact that Intel was reite

Golden Cove (Alder Lake) has been a massive uplift in performance-per-clock from the previous generations. This is also related to the fact that Intel was reiterating Skylake for most of the time until ADL, which itself is barely more than Sandy Bridge with a few generations of iterative tweaks. I believe Raptor Cove (what will be in 13th gen) is not that big of a change from Alder Lake; it's the same but with some refinements and mainly larger caches. Furthermore, the P-core/E-core divide means that they can make the P-cores quite large and inefficient, as E-cores will pick up the heavily-threaded tasks. So while a Zen core is significantly smaller than a Golden Cove core, Gracemont is much smaller still.