Intel® Core™ i7-12700T Processor is more than sufficient and they should have started and stopped with T processors and ended with an I7.
I am an engineer and I really don't think HP has ever hired a competent engineering staff. This is all about catering to a gamer mentality.
Catering to a gamer mentality? With a workstation that is marketed (to the degree that such products are marketed) purely at workstation users? Yeah, sorry, I don't see that.
As for keeping with T series CPUs and/or stopping at the i7 - there are absolutely arguments for both choices. HP clearly had different priorities. Were they the right ones? No idea. It looks like they did a relatively poor job of tuning their i9 boost profiles, seeing how the i7 outperforms it in many cases (which is indicative of the i9 being stuck in boost-throttle cycling). But that could be overcome with some pretty basic BIOS tweaks on HP's end. With proper boost behaviour, the i9 should noticeably beat out the i7 in nT workloads due to its higher core count. Other than that they'd obviously perform the same at any power limit that doesn't let the i9 boost higher than the i7.
As for the locked-down BIOS - this is a prebuilt. That's what you get, no matter the OEM. That's just life. And the overwhelming majority of workstation users don't care whatsoever.
I get that you're of the opinion that this is junk. That's a valid opinion, but one that I find to be ... well, harsh verging on stupid. It's clearly a flawed product, but junk? Nonsense.
Oh, and there are plenty of i5 and i7 SKUs of this, seeing how you're taking such offense at the i9 version.
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