Realistically speaking, a 12P+0E design will be a regression in multithreaded performance against the existing 8P+16E processors in controlled, benchmarked environments. However, the extra high performance execution units should prove very useful in many more real-world scenarios, without the drawbacks of the 12-core Ryzen processors' split CCDs or their X3D counterparts' imbalanced hardware configuration.
E-cores also come in clusters of 4, which roughly take the same die area as one P-core. I believe you wanted something like the Royal Core design, where there are P-cores and a couple of super big cores. This was supposed to be Beast Lake and to be marketed as Core Ultra series 4 (after Panther Lake/series 3, which would be Arrow Lake's refinement still on LGA 1851), but it was unfortunately canned last year.
probably the reason they reinvigorate 1700 socket is that their consumer data shows, a vast amount of people ranging around enthusiast consumer denominator are on this socket. Also the current growth rate on the socket in terms of sales might even be higher than on the arrow lake one.
So i think nobody minds if they would even try out different chiplet designs, as realistically speaking they have the opportunity to make a legendary cpu for this platform.
If the performance is good a fair consumer price could be as high as ~300 Dollar/Eur. Releasing the most potent chip i would definitely suggest try to delay well into 2026,
as coming 2 years actually will be interesting to gauge how long current cpu computing power availabilities are reasonably priced or affordable for consumers for gaming in triple aaa games. Was kind of surprised to read that for certain upcoming titles for a minimum of 60fps a 13700k is recommended.
For the one who noticed the reason i mention an octa p core as i think this is the consumer cpu what will work well into 2035+, as we now are abandoning for gaming 4corep and can do well with souped up 6core p, the 8core p will be very solid base to improve game design programming performance etc.