[rcxdude]

static to dynamic power ratio isn't efficiency though (and static power in modern desktop chips is tiny compared to the dynamic power). The dynamic power is not linearly related to processing speed (in fact it's much worse). If you downclock and undervolt a ryzen processor it will use much less power than the decrease in speed (e.g. from stock, if you drop performance by ~20% you might get a ~40% power decrease). Obviously at a certain point you will start to get worse again but most chips are not at peak performance/watt at their stock settings because raw performance and performance/cost also matters.

[willis936]

That scaling has a limited range before static power becomes dominant. Compute efficiency is compute / energy (total power * time). Total power includes static power. An SBC pulls far less from the wall than an x86 desktop could ever hope to when calculating the first million digits of pi.

As an example: even if I halted my desktop at 0 MHz and it still magically took the same time to calculate the first million digits of pi as a raspberry pi, it still would be using far more power.

[zozbot234]

Static power ratio is increasing in modern processing nodes, to the point where a "rush to idle state" strategy starts to make sense because you can power down subsystems in idle states but you can't do that if you lower processing speed. The tradeoff would of course be different in a chip that was architecturally designed from the ground up for low-performance use, but that would be from things other than just a lower frequency for the same chip.