That's what people generally expected when the whole P-core vs E-core on different microarchitectures design was announced. Instead of going for this, Intel went out of their way to state that there would be no AVX-512 even on P-cores and that's that. Ignoring this obvious solution is part of why I'm so flabbergasted at the situation.
Then they can just say so and spin it as a PR win - "look how security conscious we are these days". Very publicly removing a formerly-headline feature with no explanation and then even failing at that is just mind boggling.
