Apple's perf/watt is much higher than AMD. Anandtech has the A14 within a few percent of the 5950X on single threaded workloads. Power consumption is 5 watts (entire iPhone 12) versus 49 watts (5950X package power).
Normalizing for performance (say A14 vs 5950X at 4.5GHz instead of 5GHz) would close the gap somewhat, but it's still huge. Perhaps 4x instead of 10x - those last 500MHz on the AMD chip cost a ton of power.
Of course, none of this is particularly surprising considering Apple is using both a newer process and gets nearly 60% higher IPC.
Seems like the A14 is within 10-20% of the desktop 5950X in single threaded workloads. The M1 will probably close the gap with higher clock speeds. AMD will probably still be ahead on multithreaded workloads until Apple releases a chip with 8 high-performance cores.
Unfortunately, they're not thin compared to a laptop lid. Especially with the taper near the edges that Macbooks and many other high-end laptops have. There are some exotic optical solutions out there that allow for thinner lenses but I doubt we'll see those in laptops anytime soon.
Normalizing for performance (say A14 vs 5950X at 4.5GHz instead of 5GHz) would close the gap somewhat, but it's still huge. Perhaps 4x instead of 10x - those last 500MHz on the AMD chip cost a ton of power.
Of course, none of this is particularly surprising considering Apple is using both a newer process and gets nearly 60% higher IPC.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...