[dijit]

Where do you get the info about power draw?

Intel doesn't publish anything except TDP.

Being generous and saying TDP is actually the consumption; most Intel Mac's actually shipping with "configurable power down" specced chips ranging from 23W (like the i5 5257U) to 47W (like the i7 4870HQ); (NOTE: newer chips like the i9 9980HK actually have a lower TDP at 45w)

of course TDP isn't actually a measure of power consumption, but M2 Max has a TDP of 79W which is considerably more than the "high end" Intel CPU's; at least in terms of what Intel markets.

[senttoschool]

Check here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

Keep in mind that Intel might ship a 23w chip but laptop makers can choose to boost it to whatever it wants. For example, a 23w Intel chip is often boosted to 35w+ because laptop makers want to win benchmarks. In addition, Intel's TDP is quite useless because they added PL1 and PL2 boosts.

[dijit]

Apple always shipped their chips with "configurable power down" when it was available, which isn't available on higher specced chips like the i7/i9 - though they didn't disable boost clocks as far as I know.

The major pains for Apple was when the thermal situation was so bad that CPUs were performing below base clock. -- at that point i7's were outperforming i9's because they were underclocking themselves due to thermal exhaustion; which feels too weird to be true.

[senttoschool]

That's not Apple. That's Intel. Intel's 14nm chips were so hot and bad that they had to be underclocked. Every laptop maker had to underclock Intel laptop chips - even today. The chips can only maintain peak performance for seconds.

[MichaelZuo]

Can you elaborate?

My 2019 macbook pro 15 with the i9-9880H can maintain the stock 2.3GHz clock on all cores indefinitely, even with the iGPU active.