[imtringued]

>people in the PC space were yamming on and on about how numbers don't show how much better x86 cpus are at 'desktop stuff' and that ARM cpus can't equal x86, even with the same thermal envelope and shouldn't ever be compared.

It needs 30W at 4 cores 3.2Ghz. Ryzen needs around 5W per core but it's on a worse process. The entire system does use less power than a x86 system but that has nothing to do with the processor. It's more about how the SoC is arranged and that RAM is (almost) on the same package. It means they can get away with higher bandwidth and lower power consumption for the entire system.

The idea that it's all about the processor is completely wrong. Yet all we have heard is how fanboys cry it's going to be 3x faster than desktop CPUs because of misleading TDP numbers.

[AgloeDreams]

As far as we know, all four large cores at max plus the 4 small is ~20W. Whole chip max power use is 30W including GPU and the ML processor. Ryzen also blows a lot of power on things other than cores but AMD is absolutely the closest to this however. The hard thing for them is that the Big/Little arch is a huge advantage for battery use at idle. I would say the game being played here is that Apple is betting on this to scale all the way up for fast burst but they know that the real advantage is that their cores can also scale much much lower than anything out there. Less about magical performance gains and more about remarkable power use paired with much better power management lessons learned by making smartphones. Qualcomm could do this too if they actually cared about it.