Not really comparable though.
My daily driver is a Hackintosh and with the CPUs pegged pulls about 70W from the wall. The two displays add another 90W.
M1 is impressively efficient but there's still a gap for fast, no-compromise workstations.
But on a laptop, it matters a ton. Personally I prefer doing work from my couch rather than my desk; ergonomics and external monitors be damned.
Around 40 years old is usually when you start to pay for carelessness with your body. Ask me how I know ...
Apple has already said that they are releasing a workstation-class M1X/M2 next year.
The point is that the M1 is already comparable to many workstations.
Not sure how power use actually matters when I'm sitting and waiting for things to compile several times a day.
If anything, then numbers in TFA are an outlier rather than a contradiction.
The top Intel MacBook has 8 cores and only beats the M1 (4 performance cores) by 1 minute.
The desktop Hackintosh most likely has way more cores, expecting the low power M1 to beat it is unrealistic.
Don't congratulate Apple for failing to ship trash.
There's an argument for efficiency on a laptop, no doubt, but that's not what the parent commenter is talking about.
M1 is the highest perf-per-watt CPU today, no question. Ignoring efficiency, there are plenty of faster CPUs both for single-core and multi-core tasks. That's what "my Hackintosh did the build in 5 minutes" is showing.
You can relax the power limits and try to clock it closer to the 5.3GHz turbo frequency. But how much power do you need? I can't find numbers specifically for the i9-10980HK, but it seems like the desktop i9-9900K needs over 160 watts [1] to hit a mere 4.7GHz across all cores, measured at the CPU package (ie. not including VRM losses). Overall system power would be in excess of 200 watts, perhaps 300 watts with a GPU. Good luck cooling that in a laptop unless it's 2 inches thick or has fans that sound like a jet engine.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9...
I assume they do this for market segmentation; see 2016 Touch Bar vs. non-Touch-Bar Pro. One fan vs. two.
The TDPs look appropriate for M1 parts. They're too small for Intel. I'm guessing that (a) Apple predicted the M1 transition sooner and (b) Apple designed ahead for Intel's roadmap (perf at reduced TDP) which never eventuated.
So, unfortunately, Apple have shipped a generation of laptops with inadequate cooling.
Are you saying it's an unfair comparison? The Intel Macs are operating in the same environment as the M1 Macs. It doesn't matter if the Intel parts could be faster in theory, because you're still dealing with battery and size constraints. If you want unthrottled Intel CPU in a laptop, your only options are 6 pound, 2 inch thick gaming laptops with 30 minutes of battery life. Now comparing that (or worse, a desktop) to M1 is unfair.
Apple's thermal solutions could be better, but they are designed within Intel's power envelope specs. e.g. The i9-9880H in the current 16" MBP is only rated for 2.3Ghz with all cores active at its 45W TDP. The i9-9880H is a 2.3Ghz @ 45W part that can burst up to 4.8Ghz for short periods, not the other way around.
is it just a matter of making a thicker laptop?
There's nothing in M1 that indicates that Apple learned how to improve thermal management, but lots to indicate that they'd still rather make thinner/lighter devices that compromise on repair, expansion, or sustained high-end performance — the even deeper RAM integration, offering binned parts as the lower-end "budget" option instead of a designed solution, or offering Thunderbolt 3, fewer PCIe lanes, and a lower RAM cap as being enough for a MBP or Mini.
This is telling just about how unrealistic Geekbench benchmarks, used by most reviewers, really are - they were all forecasting M1 completely humiliating everything from Intel and yet in practice it's not quite right. It's a dang impressive chip still though.