Since when was TDP a deciding factor in desktop purchasing decisions?
Sure M SOCs are great on laptops, but there are no reasons to get them on the desktop, slower, more expensive and with less compatibility.
I've never tried to water cool a 125 watt processor and so I can't speak to that. But especially if one uses air cooling or ideally passive cooling, one's ability to reduce noise is proportional to the chip's TDP. Noise reduction is important to many.
Lower power consumption means less heat, which means you might see more reliable performance (less likelihood of throttling in the middle of intensive workloads)
This doesn’t matter for everyone’s use case, but it is a factor some people might consider.
It’s such a strawman point. But this comparison is totally bonkers. If you’re doing a workload meant for a 4080/4090 then you really have no business pointing at the M2 Ultra as a competitor.
Then there’s comparing like technology to like technology. Something like the 5700G AMD line, and that’s not even nvidia. But that probably isn’t as interesting to the authors.
Whoever is doing the caring should reconsider their life choices at that price. At 51 cents per kilowatt hour, personal solar + batteries are a vailable alternative. If you cared about the planet, you'd move
I considered it an important factor even 15 years ago, long before the reality of the environmental and energy crises really dawned on us. Surely I can't be alone.
I've never tried to water cool a 125 watt processor and so I can't speak to that. But especially if one uses air cooling or ideally passive cooling, one's ability to reduce noise is proportional to the chip's TDP. Noise reduction is important to many.