Intel’s mistake was calling the 11900k an i9. It just wasn’t a good marketing decision. Going from 10 cores back to 8 and calling it an i9 was already making people upset, and by calling it an i9, that meant reviewers and the press would compare it to the 5900x that has 12 cores and the 10900k. And both win in multicore performance.
If intel couldn’t deliver more Cypress cove cores on 14nm because of size and power constraints, then with alder coming soon, Intel could just have ceded the i9 market for 6 months. If the 11900k was instead an i7-11750k, then it would’ve been compared to the 5800x and the 10700k, and it is a pretty significant upgrade above the 10700k. Quite impressive.
What they’ve done by backporting and bringing a new core design to 14nm is impressive. But no one is talking about that because chose the wrong battlefield to play on. And they’re suffering for it. They had to have known the 5900x’s performance in non-gaming apps, so why charge the same price for much worse performance? Why force the industry to compare your part against the 5900x?? Who would want to buy it when they could get the 5900x?
Finally, intel seems to have used the same core design to bin the different skus. Meaning all the chips have space for the igpu and avx512. For the lower skus, they fused off cores, and for the f skus, they fused off the igpu. Rather than having just one core design, especially one with space for an igpu, why didn’t Intel have an additional cypress cove core design without the igpu so that it could have added more cores? Many enthusiasts don’t need a chip with an igpu as they have a dedicated gpu. Ryzen 5000 chips don’t have an igpu and yet the 5900x and 5950x destroy intel. Not sure why they didn’t put the space they had to better use.