I'm not taking sides but the Ryzen 5 7520U was definitely A LOT cheaper then would be expected...
I don't take sides either - the result is the only thing that matters.
So here goes: AMD's press release announcing Mendoccino (7X2XU for the rest of you) said: for ultra-budget laptops (ie competing with Celeron and Pentium), but with better integrated graphics, better battery life, and DDR5 RAM. The only thing that didn't carry through was the price - these were supposed to come in sub-$300 laptops. Oops. Truth be told, the only problem I had with these was labeling one of them a Ryzen 5 - it should have been capped at Ryzen 3. Consider: the Ryzen 5 7520 that Intel is roasting underperforms the Ryzen 3 5300U (2021), and of course the Ryzen 3 73
30U (Zen 3 refresh to the 5300U with DDR5 support). To be fair, there are no Zen 4 Ryzen 3s, those start from Ryzen 5.
Sorry, Intel is right about this one. This ONE processor.
And as said, no one's processor numbers have ever been very clear to the consumer. To cherry-pick one example (hey, everyone is doing it), I love how the i3-1220P (28W, 2 P-cores and 6 E-cores) outperforms the i7-1265U (15W, 2 P-cores and 8 E-cores) by a slight margin. It does appear that Intel is separating the high-powered processors from the low-powered ones next generation, calling the former Core Ultra and the latter Core, so maybe the consumer will understand that a Core 7 may not outperform a Core Ultra 5, but we'll see when the reviews come in.