That smaller area is barely a few mm^2 smaller than Intel, while heat density would almost certainly be higher in Zen they're also further apart. Three chiplets for 12-16 cores, at least 2 for lower core variants, have an entire IHS to dissipate heat from. Silicon is already a poor conductor of heat with pretty much all the heat taken care of through the IHS, so no die area usually has not that much of bearing on temps ~ the bigger issue is IHS/TIM & cooler!
This is absolutely not accurate whatsoever. Remember: AMD's cores are essentially half the size of Intel's cores. That means, if consuming the same amount of power, thermal density is
doubled. That represents a massive increase in silicon temperature at the same power draw, simply because the same amount of thermal energy is released in half the area. This obviously doesn't double temperatures (temperature scales are mostly arbitrary after all, and you need complex forumulas to convert energy output in a material to temperature), but it raises them significantly. The importance of the IHS, TIM and cooler are
because of this increase in die temperature. If the die didn't have higher thermal density, you wouldn't need a better IHS, TIM or cooler.
Also, saying Zen cores are further apart is similarly inaccurate. Their smaller size means they are grouped closer per CCD, meaning that per CCD, not only is thermal density higher because of smaller cores, but it's doubly higher because of smaller cores that are grouped closer together. And, as Zen works with all modern schedulers to focus workloads onto one CCD as much as possible, relatively little work will be spread across the spatially separated CCDs until this is necessitated by the workload (essentially one or more heavy workloads exceeding the non-SMT thread count of one CCD). If you run a heavy 8T workload on a 5950X, the second CCD will be used only for background tasks, or will be asleep. Zen, at least Zen3 but IIRC also Zen2, is very aggressive in shuffling low threaded work between cores to avoid them overheating, but this is AFAIK entirely limited to the same CCD, as the latency penalty of moving a thread from one CCD to the other would be far too high, and would tank performance.
What you say above about the thermal conductivity makes it seem like you don't understand the core of this issue at all. A larger die area doesn't help cooling because of the thermal conductivity of silicon, it helps because the thermal energy is converted from electrical energy across a larger area, meaning that the temperature increase acorss said area will be lower. This isn't because of thermal conductivity, but simply a product of area (or really volume) of material vs. the absolute amount of energy in play. If you put a blowtorch to a penny, that penny will melt. If you were able to spread that same blowtorch flame across a bunch of pennies - even if their circular shape makes them conduct energy between each other very poorly - each penny would be much cooler.
how is my 5950X rig already elderly 