Someone on Notebookcheck said CPU choice could be related to the lack of AVX-512 support on the 12th gens. But I have my doubts. Wouldn't the GPU be the most important component for ML workloads in general?
Mostly, but sometimes when I'm prototyping to get quick results I will write CPU-intensive preprocessing steps (i.e. very ugly loops of shame) before converting to matrix algebra for the GPU.