You're correct that AMD’s offerings are impressive, but that‘s vs an uncooled A12 chip. Add active cooling and a few more watts there's no reason why they couldn't blow the doors off.
> AMD’s
> that‘s
What is your method of input where you use three different characters for apostrophes?
The A12 will pull around 4w on a single-core workload to come close to 9900K in performance. That's a good number, but it's not unheard of. The 4800HS is also a 4w per core CPU, and also comes close to the 9900K in performance.
The problem is increasing single-core performance becomes non-linear. It's not just a few more watts to bump from 3ghz to 4ghz. It's a lot of watts.
Simply having 4 big cores on an A12 would push it into 10w actively cooled territory as well, same as the i5 in a macbook air (a CPU that's also 10w). Add a few watts to bump the single core performance while you're at it and suddenly it's a 20w chip. Make it 8-cores to compete with the current macbook pro CPUs and suddenly it's a 40w chip.
The A12X/A12Z already has 4 big cores (and 4 little cores, and 7-8 GPU cores). I imagine the A14X will follow this pattern, but the cores will be 2 generations newer, with 2 generations of performance-per-watt improvements.
This isn't unique to Apple, either. The "big" cores in ARM CPUs have been pulling 2-4W for years and years. That's why thermal throttling is such a major issue in mobile, especially mobile games.
Hence it makes much more sense to treat the A series processors as 2 watt chips when looking at multi-core scores. They're targeting efficiently hitting these lower frequencies. You'll get a similar result for the 4800HS; it'll use a lot more than 4 W single-core.
The problem here is a severe lack of quality data. The best we have right now is SPEC2006 which is unfortunately only single core. You're absolutely right that it makes more sense to compare like for like in workloads, but we don't have any good multithreaded cross-platform benchmarks. There's geekbench, but it's somewhere between mediocre and shitty. And then nothing else? There's then no multithreaded benchmarks that also have measured power draw on an A12/A13.
A 4800HS at it's 4w/core all core load is also still clocking higher than an A12X. When Apple has the thermal budget to spend as well they'd almost certainly do the same thing?
> A 4800HS at it's 4w/core all core load is also still clocking higher than an A12X.
This doesn't mean that much, since the range of efficient clock speeds depends on design choices, so they aren't always 1:1 comparable between architectures. Apple might well increase clock speed on their desktop chips, but unless it's only a few percent, it won't be as simple as pumping more power into the same dies; they have to actually redesign the core to operate efficiently at those higher speeds.