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by locustous 1109 days ago
Most of those systems sit at idle, when they are on at all. Idle power is not the same as TDP. The idle difference is not so great that it's a big deal.
2 comments

Do you have a source showing idle numbers? I’ve never seen a comparison. The ones I’ve seen are always about max power.
It's not apples vs apples. Literally and figuratively. The I/O or board features on PC boards will eat power. So you will end up with a 15-30 W idle vs probably 5-8 for the Mac. I doubt the PCIe on the pro does much to the power unless there is an extra I/O die on system, you need active chips to eat power. That is vs Intel.

AMD will add a bunch more watts to the idle number as their multi CCX CPUs just eat more power at idle. You'll be closer to 30-45 W idle. This is a guess, it's widely acknowledged but not really quantified that I've found.

AMD monolithic dies are more in line with Intel. IE the laptop/mini PC line will be nice and low.

The difference is vastly diminished when you add the display that's using 80 Ws. So that's 85 vs 100 W total system power? 15% difference that gets bigger when you peg your processor.

Apple numbers are better in pretty much every way on power. But we're talking a handful of watts. Even at really high power rates it isn't going to add to up much.

Sources: I have a Mac mini and an Intel raptor lake desktop. I take measurements. And I have read various sources. This is my best information.

Whataboutism.
Yea, sure you can argue for the sake of arguing

but yea it makes difference if the difference is

0.001% 0.01% 0.1% 1% 10% 1000%