Look to me a significant amount of engineering went into making sure the chip can withstand the amount of power it is drawing. Basically a desperate move by Intel to keep their outdated design from being completely smoked by AMD.
I'm still baffled by that showing years later. Over-engineered, over-cooled chips to reach absurd speed record has been a staple since as far as I remember, like back in the Pentium 2 or before. Why did anyone at Intel think they should hide the sauce, or get pissed when fans got to it, is beyond my comprehension.
Didn't they use a chiller?
Which, taken as the usual world record and cool feat of cpu speed would have been perfectly fine and impressive, but they were getting scared of AMD so for some weird reason some idiot in their PR team insisted on pretending from top to bottom that this was a normal chip running on normal condition, and when Asus (I think ?) let fans see how it was achieved Intel gave them less than 30 minutes to give the chip back.
This was not a great era for Intel ...
The 9Ghz clock was achieved not through any normal cooling or by efficiency of the chip.
These overclocking records have been around for decades but they're in no way shape or form representative of the average of even the top 1% of users.
It's impressive purely because it was possible with an off the shelf chip.
AMD has raised their market share over the last 4-5 years from about 8% to 31% of x86 sales. Intel also saw 5 straight years of market share declines against AMD in the server space - which is by far the most lucrative.
And yes, they're also worried about ARM and Nvidia.
ARM is another threat on the horizon on that front, but it's nothing compared to the beating AMD has been giving them since the Ryzen showed up.
However, I still own a substantial amount of Intel stocks because it will be one of the most valuable company in the world if China uses military action against Taiwan. If not, then I still believe Intel will be successful with their IFS strategy because the world is about to enter an era where compute will never be enough and designers want a second supplier next to TSMC.
20A is sort of Intel’s first foray. 18A is really their serious node.
If you think Intel has a chance to leap TSMC, it will come at the 14A node but you have to bet that TSMC is wrong to stay with low NA.
Meanwhile, Intel absolutely needed to try to take much bigger risks.
A pretty good article showing that low NA might be more cost effective: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/asml-dilemma-high-na-euv-is-w...
Lastly, the biggest chip you can make with low NA is 858 mm² which is nearly 2x bigger than high NA at 429 mm². This means it's impossible to make a chip as large as the Nvidia H100 GPU using high NA. If Nvidia uses Intel's 14A process, they will have to split the chip into multiple pieces and go chiplets approach. They're already doing it with Blackwell but that's stitching 2x 800mm²+ dies together. If they make a future chip using high NA nodes, they'd have to stitch 4x dies together to have the equivalent size which is considerably harder for GPUs.
I do believe that all highend chip makers will be switching to the chiplet approach. Everyone has to due to the high NA reticle limit. But TSMC's approach allows designers to keep making chips twice the size until around 2030. That's a huge advantage.
So it follows that intel is doing something similar i.e. NN type units which may be used for ML, where the cache is not so important, or in your typical non-ML settings such as gaming or web browsing, these NN units will reduce cache misses at an incredible rate and thus (effectively) up memory i/o rates by 400-500%