“AlderLake” ADL was meant to be designed for efficiency – this was the very point of the hybrid “big.LITTLE” architecture – that despite the huge changes required for software support – at least in the Windows x86 world – it would be worth it. While the performance was good (despite the loss of AVX512 vs. RKL/TGL/ICL) the (turbo) power required reached new levels which brought power efficiency down.
“RaptorLake” RPL brings slightly updated big Cores and 2x more Little Atom cores in order to improve power efficiency – that also improves raw performance due to higher/longer turbo headroom due to lower power and lower thermals. For laptop/tablet platforms this will help tremendously – but for desktops and (low-end) workstations/servers – more compute power would have been preferred.
Windows 11 (22H2) is now more mature and a lot of software (like Sandra) had time to update and optimise – thus in effect RPL will perform better due to updated software ecosystem. Firmware, BIOS, etc. are also updated and likely helping overall performance.
Read more @ SiSoftware