My point being that while you said that you have the choice, you basically don’t sound like what you said. Again, if performance is bad, look away. If price is bad, look away. No companies can miraculously create great products consistently. Think Intel not too long ago with Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Comet Lake and Rocket Lake, isn‘t that proof? I basically jumped from Skylake, skipped everything else and ended with Comet Lake, and now Alder Lake. The products in between are not meaningful upgrades.
If you observe, CPUs and SOCs of recent years generally post unmeaningful gain in performance while sucking a lot more power. Intel appears to buck the trend with Alder Lake, but that is because people tend to compare it to a low bar set by Rocket Lake. Comparing it with Zen 3, it is faster no doubt, but that’s mostly down to having the E-cores to support the big cores. Looking at the upcoming Raptor Lake, the IPC gains are not great either. The point I am driving at is that the fabs are not shrinking the nodes like its really 7nm to 5nm. Those are just some marketing numbers. Nobody really knows what you are getting other than the fabs themselves. So we have probably hit a bottleneck here where increasing performance = to pushing higher power. And there is a limit as to how much power you can push. Intel probably set the record if 350W is allowed on a retail CPU.