[Dylan16807]

You can get x86 chips designed for laptops in desktop form factors too.

It's not about Arm. All of Apple's M chips so far have been primarily designed for mobile use, and that strongly affects how the power usage scales. It makes a basic comparison of watts not very useful.

[kuschkufan]

> All of Apple's M chips so far have been primarily designed for mobile use

There, you said it again. This is wrong - you hear Apple M chip and you think "laptop" primarily, but that is no longer true. Just as it would be to say ARM is primarily for smartphones. Now I don't want to talk about sales numbers, but the M chips in the Apple Studio and Mac Pro (and those used by other manufacturers in servers) are a different category than "laptop". For a quick shallow impression see: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-14900k-v...

(nevermind it's the i9-14900K)

Again, the I9 is more powerful, but that doesn't make all of ARM or M a "laptop".

[Dylan16807]

> the M chips in the Apple Studio and Mac Pro (and those used by other manufacturers in servers) are a different category than "laptop".

The M2 ultra is basically two M2 Maxs stuck together. It's the same chip that's in laptops, and was designed around a laptop power budget.

In what way is it in a different category?

Designing for different power targets has a significant effect on power and performance metrics. When a chip is designed to be able to take tons of watts, that hurts its efficiency even when you're currently running at a low wattage. So comparing chips with different wattage philosophies gets tricky.