Insane that a major player like intel bungled up the 12th gen processors so badly.
They were desperate.
History goes like this (al regel achas): Intel had been stagnant from the 3rd through 7th gen of Core-i processors. AMD was barely able to produce anything of worth - they were trying to make do by selling for budget and the like.
AMD started designing for cutting edge 7nm chips manufactured by an outside company - TSMC. The processors that came out of this process became Zen 1 (or Ryzen). Their first product was just for desktops, and because the raw product was so much better (Intel was still stuck on 14nm at the time), the processors were better at raw tasks.
Intel's processors were still able to out-finesse them, so Intel was never more than a little behind throughout Zen 2, and they were always better for gaming and far, far better in laptops (where finesse matters much more, kamuvan).
Even when Intel transitioned to 10nm, they did not regain the raw performance crown. At this point, AMD had worked out the kinks in Ryzen and their laptops started to outpace Intel in raw benchmarks. Indeed, the advantage of 7nm was such that they achieved parity with Intel in metrics such as heat production and battery life, while outpacing them in certain benchmarks. (Arguably, Intel had better gaming at this point, but it was starting to bounce back and forth - Intel put out a better one, then AMD, then Intel.)
Intel's answer to AMD, no doubt designed around the second generation of Ryzen when it was apparent how things would go, hit the markets in the 12th gen. The processor had a radical redesign intended to regain the raw performance crown once and for all. They did - but at the cost of all their finesse. If you read the benchmarks, you will see that Intel is outperforming AMD in raw benchmarks, but they did that in exchange for pumping in more power and requiring better heat dissipation. The manufacturers were obviously not prepared for this, and I'm sure Intel will work out the kinks in the future, but for those of us who do not need raw power - for laptops - AMD is the clear choice right now.
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