[ianhowson]

Well... yeah... but they also dropped clock rate from 2.5GHz-ish to 1.7GHz-ish. That could equally well explain the increase in core count at the same TDP. You're gaining about 15% IPC improvement from Kaby->Whiskey [1].

It's an overall improvement, but not as dramatic as "2x cores for 2x perf at the same power"

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14514/examining-intels-ice-la...

[cpgxiii]

"Base" clock dropped, but boost clocks remained fairly high. In practice performance gains were quite good (except, notably, for that time when Apple used old power control firmware and had 6C/12T processors underperform their 4C/8T predecessors).

The point of this is that the significant improvement from Kaby Lake to Whiskey Lake involved only small architectural refinement and updates to an existing process, so much larger performance/power improvements should absolutely be expected from an entirely new process plus architecture refinement.