It has a maximum power consumption of 39W, with an idle consumption of 6.8W. Both measured “on wall”, so including ram, storage and everything else.

Compare it to the previous (Intel) generation that uses 20W idle and 122W under load, while not matching the M1 in neither CPU nor GPU performance.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201897

This does not address wether the GPU throttles in high CPU usage scenarios.

That being said, RAM and storage is pretty negligible. LPDDR4/X uses around 0.2-0.5w, and around 0.1-0.05w for storage.

There is also no reason to compare to Intel. The competition for Macs aren't older macs - newer macs are always going to be better than older macs. The competition is to what they could have been if they went for AMD, and to other computers of similar form-factors.

In both cases, you're comparing to AMD, not Intel.

With regards to performance and power consumption, AMD is not far ahead of Intel. Yes, they have better performance when you factor in all the Intel "bugs" like branch predition, but it's only about 10%-20%, and TDP is more or less the same.

Comparing it to a M1 will yield the same results. The lowest TDP i can could find was 65W for a Ryzen 3, which is still long way from M1 in both power consumption and performance.

https://www.tomshardware.com/features/amd-vs-intel-cpus

Why are you comparing AMD desktop processors with laptop processors on power efficiency? That's incredibly contrived.

Compare the 5900HS with the M1, which is a 35W SoC, just like the M1, and much, much faster than any Rzyen 3.

It’s an SOC. Unless you consider the CPU basically just the ALU and register file (a quite reasonable but long outdated position) it’s all the same power budget for the M series.

It's a simple result. SoC or not, if total power consumption is at X with only the CPU while the GPU is inactive, then it will either be at >X when using both CPU and GPU at the maximum, or be slower in CPU performance.

This holds for SoCs or for systems that manage total power equally.