I agree with everything except that it's architecture agnostic. It isn't even model agnostic. I mean, sure - philosophy is agnostic. Yet the implementation results can be wildly different. Race to finish isn't a guarantee of power saving on its own. Eg if task takes 10 seconds on 200W that's 2kJ. But if we "race" and use 320W to finish in 8s then we spend ~2.5kJ. So THAT brakes the philosophic model. And slower CPU is actually more efficient. That's what happens to Alder Lake. It is very efficient at 1500MHz, but from there it shoots up, and if it's around 1700J and 5800J at 5GHz then the efficiency falls. Since it's same CPU, we can say that task competition will be almost linear from 1.5 to 5GHz so 3.33x faster. But it spends 3.2x the energy. So it goes outside efficiency curve and race to finish actually spends more power. On other hand you can take Zen 2 graphs and see that at same task it uses about 1200 J at 1.5GHz but 1100 J at 3.5GHz. So task is done 2.33x faster at same energy cost (bit lower actually) and in that case yes it did make sense of "race to finish" philosophy. That's underlined by TPU graphs as well, where you can clearly see 12600K and 12700K being slightly more efficient by spending less energy to finish that multithreaded Cinebench run. If you look at 12400F review, it too beats 12900K ever so slightly. And eg Ryzen 5600X is likewise even better at this metric than 12400F (so 12600/700/900 as well). Now sure you can underclock, undervolt, and whatever, but looking at CPUs as they cane from factory, Intel obviously missed the sweet spot. Add to all that a fact that at idle Intel system draws slightly more power, racing to finish isn't saving any power in that generation. Now sure, it saves *time* for end user, if they work with tasks that are very time sensitive, but that's not a majority of people, and they won't mind less efficient CPU if they can do more/earn more in one work day. Most people will do a task, then PC will idle waiting for user. So if task X spends 10kJ on 12900K and 9.5kJ on 12400F and 9kJ on 5600X, and then idles at 55W (whole system) for 12900K, 54W for 12400F and 51W for 5600X then you can't say that 12900K is somehow more efficient JUST because it finished quicker. So again, yes, philosophy of race to finish (and idle/low power state) is correct one, but execution gives different results. Plus, again, if you game 4h on eg 12900K and 5600K, with everything else in PC being same, you will get higher power bill (and more heat in your room) with 12900K. Sure you may have 2-3 FPS more but as if that will actually change your experience. Anyway, to finally apply that to 13000 series, if they are to be actually efficient they'll need more than just relying on race to finish. Because eg yesterday or whatever they've leaked supposed 350W 13900K with power limit removed, but it spent 60% more watts to be 14% faster. That would be 60% more watts for 14% less seconds, so about 36% more energy spent to finish a task. Luckily that's overclocking, but still, they are obviously not aiming at actual efficiency. I mean, just look at laptops, they actually regressed in battery life with Alder Lake, now it seems they'll regress again. Sure we get more speed but also less run time. I am similarly disappointed with Zen 4 power rumors, waiting to see if world went all crazy for next gen