Not sure I should argue you on the one gen claim—there’s a lackluster refresh claimed, I think? You already admit they’re quite good for non-gaming-focused work.
Yeah, they're quite good, and that's the problem.
Raptor lake is also
quite good for less money
AM5 is
very good for the same money, but it also has a future that is likely to include 12-core chiplets and 24-core/48-thread Zen6 offerings. How's that 8 P-core Arrow Lake refresh looking?
If you're not gaming there the i7-265K is on par or slightly better than a 14700(K) but realistically the differences are pretty minor and a lot of the time Ryzen dominates the top results in the charts, even after the months of OS and microcode patches to Arrow Lake.
These days, if you're needing a fast CPU for work you are likely doing one of three things; AI, encoding, or rendering - and AM5 is much better overall in all three categories, even if Intel scores the occasional win in one or two tests. I'd be willing to give Arrow Lake more support if it was an improvement on the previous generation, but it really wasn't. It's merely an "okay" chip that's dissappointing even if it's not actually bad.
What Arrow Lake is, as far as I can tell, is a laptop processor that's been scaled up to be sold as a desktop processor too, but it simply fails to make a real case for itself at 200W and is just disappointing stagnation. It's no worse than the 13th/14th gen offerings but the one thing it brings to the table is lower power consumption, which is still higher than AM5, but it's a good step in the right direction for Intel.
IMO Arrow Lake the most sense in productivity laptops, I think the U5-235H and U7-255H are going to be incredible in the traditional 45W market that AMD are currently dominating, and 8 Arc Alchemist cores are going to provide enough grunt in an IGP to make even laptops without a dGPU capable all-rounders.
