Thermal density plays a huge role, the size of the chips is going down faster than the wattage, so thermal density is going up every generation even if you keep the same number of transistors. And everyone is still putting more transistors on their chips as they shrink.
Going forward this is only going to get more complicated - I am very interested to see how the 5800X3D does in terms of thermals with a cache die over the top of the CCD (compute die). But anyway that style of thing seem to be the future - NVIDIA is also rumored to be using a cache die over the top of their Ada/Lovelace architecture. And obviously 60W direct to the IHS is easier to cool than 60W that has to be pulled through a cache die in the middle.
Looking it up though I do see a lot of concerns with the heat they generate. I can only conclude I don't push my chip very hard (which, honestly, I probably don't)
I've been happy with the AMDs I purchased over the past 4 years, we'll see how they hold up and how this next gen comes out. I did see that the recent Intels are quite competitive which is good for everybody.
Yeah, longevity, blah blah, but laptop chips are designed to sit above 90C under load, it's fine.
Just saying that "how hard it is to cool" doesn't solely depend on power consumption anymore. Heat density is making that harder and harder, even if power consumption stays the same.
What does improve though is how much heat it pumps into your room. Yeah, a Rocket Lake at 200W might be roughly as hard to cool as an AMD at 90W or whatever... but one is still putting 200W into your room and the other is still putting 90W. Temperatures are not the same thing as power dissipation either. I don't like having my gaming PC running in my room during the summer, and I'm actually looking at maybe running cables through the walls to have it in the basement instead. I also have a 5700G and some NUCs that are much lower power that I prefer to use for surfing and shitposting.
Sure it does. Reading the rest of your post I think you're more talking about temperature than cooling requirements, but a 200W CPU needs 200W of heat dissipation, while a 60W CPU only needs 60W of heat dissipation. It's literally a 1:1 relationship since CPUs don't do any mechanical work, so power in == heat out.
Keeping temperatures below some arbitrary number does then include things like density, IHS design, etc... But that only matters for something like Intel's "Thermal Velocity Boost" where it's really important to stay under 70C specifically instead of just avoiding thermal throttling.
I personally stick to the lower wattage ones because I don't generally need high end stuff, so I think Apple is going the right direction here, but it should be noted that Intel has also started down the path of high performance and efficiency cores already. AMD will find itself there too if it turns out that for home use, we just don't need a ton of cores, but instead a small group of fast cores surrounded by a bunch of specialist cores.