One question: why 11th gen intel cpu?

AFAIK 12th is not yet fully supported on Linux (thread scheduler or something along those lines).

It should be supported in a coming release last I checked.

I did not realise that. Thanks for the info.

Someone on Notebookcheck said CPU choice could be related to the lack of AVX-512 support on the 12th gens. But I have my doubts. Wouldn't the GPU be the most important component for ML workloads in general?

Mostly, but sometimes when I'm prototyping to get quick results I will write CPU-intensive preprocessing steps (i.e. very ugly loops of shame) before converting to matrix algebra for the GPU.

because mobile 12th gen not yet available?

Many answer!