It reminds me a lot of the last days of Netburst, with heroic hacks like huge (for the time) caches, high clock speeds, and then bumping up against TDP limits.
High clock speeds are an architectural constraint driven by the market.
Intel and AMD can't sell chips that don't clock high in laptops and desktops and they can't afford to specialize much for mid-clocked server chips, so they need a design that can at least approach 5GHz for boost clocks. Instructions per Clock matters too, but the market would have a hard time buying an x86 chip that stopped at 3 GHz, even if it was double the IPC.
That means they can't make a super-wide processor like Apple that tops out around 3 GHz, where Apple is more comfortable providing sufficient cooling.
AMD's response to the later-life Pentium 4's was the Athlon 64, which was clocked substantially lower but matched or beat the P4 in most tasks. The market responded positively.
Similarly, the original Pentium was clocked substantially lower than high end 486 models when it was first introduced. It was also received positively.
In modern times, the market has responded positively to the Apple M1.
Has there actually been a CPU anywhere that has outperformed its market competitor (in price and performance), but failed to gain traction because its clock speed was too low? "The market wants high clock speeds" has been a common assumption, but I've never actually seen it work out that way in practice.
Still not as wide as the M1, but it looks like a huge step in the right direction on paper.