The upper limit of heat extraction is an interesting problem. Intel certainly seems to have bumped into a region with the i7-12900k and later where the chip is

The upper limit of heat extraction is an interesting problem. Intel certainly seems to have bumped into a region with the i7-12900k and later where the chip is heat limited under all load tests even on watercooling, and improving significantly on the best air-coolers requires taking off the protective 'heatspreader' for closer contact with a heatpipe. Those heatpipes seem to be mostly watercooled. Some kind of supercritical CO2 heatspreader with direct die fluid contact perhaps?