> their tendency to minimize battery sizes on Macs for thinness.

Is this actually a thing? Macbook Pro goes up to 100 Wh and almost nobody goes above that because it's the highest capacity battery you don't need special permission to have in a carry on at the airport.

> But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers.

I always find this argument weird because there is so little actual "together" having anything to do with it. Are TSMC's current process nodes efficient? Yes. Can you save power by dropping the refresh rate? Yes. Do the teams doing these things need to coordinate with each other somehow rather than each doing their part independently? Not really.

I think the Top500 benchmark is biased here. It’s a supercomputing benchmark which means it’s going to heavily weight SIMD and float64 performance, which are things that rarely matter for everyday computing. SIMD has uses in the real world - image or video editing, data crunching, graphics. But consumers basically never use fp64 any more, and so many modern chips have next to zero performance on them. That could easily skew the numbers in intel’s favor.

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