It's absolutely fair. Try to find an Intel CPU on the market without a node disadvantage. Doesn't exist. We can only (and it only makes sense to) compare what exists now, what consumers are able to buy right now. If Intel magically comes up with a CPU that runs on a similar node, then sure, but until then, the reality is that they're on the market at a node disadvantage. That's not something you can just wave away as "oh, well, Apple has a better node". All that matters is what devices you can buy and what their performance/power metrics are actually like.

Agreed. The argument seems to be I’ll be happy with Intel if IPC etc is competitive as I want the raw power and don’t care about battery life etc. Which might just be true for a very small section of the laptop buying market but leads to a much less useful product for the very large majority.

The point of fairness is not to give participation trophies to a company because the others had better tools. If a product is worse, then it is worse. Warm feelings because Intel does not have access to the best technology is not going to make any laptop run cooler.

I can understand the “they’re an underdog, so they deserve some money even if their products are not the absolute best”, but casting Intel as the poor underdog being steamrolled by their competition because they cannot get the latest and greatest is strange, to say the least.

I should have clarified this earlier. Personally I'm interested in how competitive Intel will be in the future (their stock took a massive dive recently).

Right now, it seems to me that Intel is behind both on the node and on the architecture vs M1 (and AMD). I expect them to eventually fix the node (or just buy from TSMC) but if they don't fix the latter that's a big deal.

From the POV of buying a CPU/laptop today, absolutely, power comparison and performance both are essential.

You've got a point, but the discussions are most of the time not about the theoretical characteristics of an architecture on a process node that it will never use. It's people beating each other on the head about which mega-corp has CPUs a few percents faster than the other.

From a historical point of view, a systematic shift to hotter, more power-hungry chips was never a good sign (see for example the various Pentium 4s and the successive incarnations of Bulldozer and Piledriver). I hope it's a stopgap and that they have a new Core 2 masterpiece being readied, but let's not kid ourselves: it does not look good. the Physics of heat transfer put a limit to the gains in performance you can achieve if you don't also increase efficiency. It's cold comfort to know that your CPU would be wonderful if cooled with liquid nitrogen when your desktop throttles under load.

That’s a very fair perspective.

I’m an Intel bear on their existing markets - mainly because even if they achieve parity with TSMC the lead is gone and others will take market share.

I’m more positive on the Intel GPU business though given the potential huge demand for ML compute.

Crazy how things change, isn’t it? How unthinkable would “Apple is a bully, give poor Intel a break” have seemed 20 years ago?