Intel has nothing to defend against even Zen3, not to mention Zen4, whose days are already running out.
They will have power efficiency improvements in Meteor Lake, but there will be virtually no performance gains - which was quite obvious from the start - or power efficiency improvements with the legacy "7nm" or speed increases with the same monstrous consumption. And the second is precisely what causes massive dissatisfaction among customers under heavy load. At low loads, thanks to better core optimization in collusion with Microsoft, they do much better than AMD, which is why they generally sell.
To simply match AMD in multi-threaded performance at 1W, they need exactly the same process technology or very close to AMD on TSMC. In the quantities of processors/SoC that Intel sells compared to AMD (5:1), it is obvious that even a theoretical complete, forced, temporary transfer of all production to TSMC is impossible for them - their volumes are simply physically unavailable at TSMC factories, where almost all conveyors ranks Apple/Qualcomm for the most advanced technological processes. AMD can play this game - and even then it is not interested in increasing supply volume in order to keep prices high with increased demand for its products, with its negligible market share compared to Intel, but Intel has no choice but to produce most of its products in its factories , into which a lot of money and effort have been poured.
Therefore, Intel today has only one true strategy to survive in the new world - becoming like TSMC, giving the opportunity to a lot of contractors to make chips at their factories - but this is an extremely unprofitable idea in reality, taking into account its status as a catching up and, moreover, increased competition in the contract market (unless, of course, we exclude oligopolistic collusion with TSMC/Samsung, which I definitely wouldn't discount in the modern world). At the same time, trying to maintain the profit margin from the production of our own processors and SoCs for laptops in order to stay afloat, while trying to maintain the level of technological leadership in terms of the real efficiency of x86 cores (if their efficiency is normalized not only by consumption, but also by the technical process - then I'm afraid AMD/Apple still turn out to be the losers for the most part).
This subtle process of "tuning" the company should ensure, taking into account, of course, subsidies from the authorities, its passage through the eye of the needle of current problems. But here it begins to very much overlap in interests with another strong company - Apple, and Qualcomm is already breathing down its neck.
In the market of such monsters, the winner is the most resilient (in terms of finances, human capital) and/or the one whose products are the most important, from the point of view of geopolitical interests. At the moment it is still Intel/AMD rather than Apple. But if the world starts to quickly move to native Arm code, in terms of code base, things will be very bad for them, in favor of Apple/Qualcomm and possibly Samsung/Mediatek. There is still a lot of jealousy from the support of the authorities and the desire to save the right company.
From the point of view of the average buyer, 2024 will definitely be boring. Even more so with an expert one. Based on the actual state of the shelves and the selection on it.
After such a sharp jump in performance for the Zen4 HX series, you shouldn't expect anything like this in the next 2 years, which means there is no particular desire for Zen4 HX series owners to upgrade. Unless for those who are avid gamers, and then only due to the fact that the mobile 4090 is about 1.5 times weaker than the desktop version, i.e. The rate of obsolescence of mobile DGPUs is much stronger than desktop ones, even though the 7945HX can easily service the future 6090, but in a laptop you cannot change the discrete chip yourself, which forces you to upgrade much more often than the processor becomes obsolete.
This would be especially obvious if the Zen4 HX memory controller were four-channel (or designed for at least DDR5 8500), but alas, it is significantly slower than that of the Raptor HX series. And it would be even better if, in HX chips, AMD decided to switch to HBM3 RAM (albeit with real bandwidth reduced to 300-400GB/s at the cost of a lower frequency or bit depth). Then it was a really balanced solution in terms of processor and RAM/memory/peripheral support for many years, but alas. And taking into account the 28 pci-e 5.0 lines (which, most of them, just hang in the air on the Zen4 HX, not being used in any way by laptop manufacturers, precisely because of the extremely slow RAM), it would be possible to display a 16x pci-e connector on gaming laptops 4.0, which uses only 8 pci-e 5.0 lines (but you can also install x16 pci-e 5.0 - all the same, 12 5.0 lines are available to other devices) and which would easily ensure an upgrade of such a powerful laptop in the future to 6090 or even 7090.
But we have what we have. Pointless 28 pci-e 5.0 lanes in 2023 laptops with Zen4 HX, most of which are just hanging in the air...
And Apple completely disappointed with the real bandwidth of its laptops compared to the declared bandwidth. They stated 300-400GB/s in the M3 Max (as in the M2 Max), but the real efficiency of the memory controller is only 120/300 - 30%-33%. This is literally 2 times worse than the efficiency of the memory controller of AMD chips, which themselves are inferior in efficiency to Intel memory controllers in terms of absolute efficiency in %.