> Apple has been gaining on Intel while both have been improving.
Have they really, though? What lines are actually crossing? Intel's mobile CPUs have continued to shed power, so how much of this is actually Apple "catching up" to Intel vs. Intel just optimizing for power at the cost of performance? As in, is there any performance gap that's actually shrinking, or are phone SoCs just getting more power hungry while laptop ones are getting less power hungry?
Because phone SoCs have gotten rather monsterously power hungry compared to years past. They are actually 5w under real world load parts now, with devices just letting them thermal throttle rapidly to achieve higher burst rates. Laptops, by contrast, are ~10w TDP, vastly less than they were a decade ago.
This would probably make a fascinating in-depth analysis, but the singular data point of a 5w SoC being within spitting distance of a 10w SoC is hardly a revolutionary story. It's pretty much what you expect.
