The exact design of the cores, how they’re scheduled, the way background stuff is handled on MacOS. All of it. The chips are made on a fantastic process too, but that alone isn’t it. For example they’ve been putting the ability to drop refresh rate really low when nothing changes to more and more of their machines.
It could be that the Intel chip is close, IDK.
But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers. And any of those alone or in combination could be part of the differences.
Is this actually a thing? Macbook Pro goes up to 100 Wh and almost nobody goes above that because it's the highest capacity battery you don't need special permission to have in a carry on at the airport.
> But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers.
I always find this argument weird because there is so little actual "together" having anything to do with it. Are TSMC's current process nodes efficient? Yes. Can you save power by dropping the refresh rate? Yes. Do the teams doing these things need to coordinate with each other somehow rather than each doing their part independently? Not really.