Intel still relevant now? jk

My understanding is that CPUs have evolved to such a state that OCing is no longer a necessity anymore. Unlike the past, the core count of a recent series i7, i9 or later i5 reached to a number that is more than enough for all kinds of applications & games. Ditto with the speed, as even games are more GPU bound than CPU limited nowadays.

To me PL2 is at the peak performance/power defined. From PL2 state, you'll need to up power like 20% just to gain 10% more performance so for me OCing further than that is pointless unless benchmarking, epeen glory, or dont know what or why they did. Plus now with unlimited PL2, a regular 12700 running at full PL2 is nearly as fast as its K sku at stock full PL2. Just take care of cooling and thats it.

As a caveat, sure, OCing will net some performance gains but how much of that is tangible to the user, as in can anyone easily tell the difference between 200FPS and 220FPS kinda situation. But that is more of a GPU OC scenario rather than CPU OC...

PS5 and Xbox X oredy has 8cores so games will soon cater for 8T or 8C CPUS. What it won't do is scale well past the 8T count as there are few incentives or rather more drawbacks if the consoles cannot play them well.
There of course are applications for massive multicore/multithreaded CPUS but otherwise games, office & normal productivity applications would not scale past a R7 / i7 CPU.
In essence current CPU tech has surpassed the apps/games that would have limited it hence why the need for OC in the past but with current CPU core count and ability to boost to PL2, there is little to gain from OCing today.

If your a programmer then you should know why modern CPU tech did not go towards single core 10-20GHZ CPU route and instead went to lower speed higher IPS multicore solutions and now towards chiplets.

If you think about it, Apple's M10 and ARM CPU are not as fast as Intel or AMD but performance wise these are matching or beating those giants. CPU speed is only one facet of a CPU performance, then there is IPS gains, thermal headroom and node shrinkage, but the key here is IPS and one way Intel did to improve IPS is shorten the pipeline and size up the cache but that in turns reduces the "speed" of the CPU (see P4 Netburst to Core2Duo arch). IPS gains give better % performance far outweigh increasing GHZ.

And then there are the modern applications, your Blender, Cinebench, Adobe Pro, that make use of many multicores. Unlike rendering or encoding process of the past where it traditionally follows in sequence as you had shown above, these apps now run processes concurrently thereby completing tasks much faster than a superfast single core CPU.

Alderlake takes this approach to another level by dedicating Ecores to completing less intensive background tasks while Pcores focus on the big processing jobs, balancing both means completing a particular instruction with better efficiency than a typical big core Ryzen. That is how AL beat Vermeer.

Intel's hybrid arch predicts that programmers will be optimising applications to breakdown more and more complex tasks into small simultaneous operations, hence why for RP they increased Ecores but not Pcores and why they are confident that ML would not suffer much performance hit when dropping down to 6 Pcores.

Games are still lagging on this development but again it depends on the development direction as again PS5/Xbox are only 8 cores and most widely used CPUS are still 6cores i5/R5, hence game developers has no incentives to scale their game to as many cores possible as such would be detrimental to consoles and 6Core PCs if not optimised well. Still, they are getting there, with huge open world sandboxes ie MS Flight Sim are already taking advantage as many cores possible.

Anyhow there are still limits to how much gains made just by adding more cores (which is not what I'm pointing at in the OP) but the key is balancing workloads enough to make use of 8, 12, 16.... 32 threads. And for that modern applications are being made to take that advantage so there is lesser need today to brute force a task with faster GHZ, unless that application is seriously unoptimised.

Hence why I said CPUS have reach a stage where simply higher GHZ are used to run operations faster but today's applications are geared towards completing task more efficiently by using the strengths of the CPU particularly the hybrid arch of AL/RP. Therefore while Ocing to increase the speed will net you gains on a similar generation platform, tweaks to arch & IPS is king as can be seen in RP where 13900K can deliver the same performance as 12900K with lower power draw.

This is actually quite insane when you remember AMD was at the verge of bankruptcy 6 years ago before Zen resurrected them.