Qualcomm practically doubled their CPU performance in the last 3 years with only one major node shrink.
All it took was a 1.4 billion dollar acquisition of Nuvia, doubling power consumption and a lawsuit with ARM.
I'm impressed, personally.
Agree that 20W is laptop territory, but it'd be 2x as fast even if they didn't double power --at iso-power it's still around ~2x performance from 8g2.
As for laptops, some gripe about the Windows on ARM platform being being the worst of both worlds when it comes to compromises in software compatibility and hardware performance / efficiency (vs. x86 machines and the Mac consumer electronics experience), but I happen to think that with this gen's SD X2 and the continuing maturity of Win11's software compatibility, it solidly hits the best of both worlds.
The main gripe against WARM laptops continues to be gaming and incompatible kernel level drivers, but that will be chiseled away over time especially now that the WARM toolchain is more mature. ARM's lawsuit delayed the first SD X, but they now seem to be on a similar cadence for cores and GPU on phone and laptop SoCs at least, so going forward they won't be stuck with the inferior performance and the chore of a developing GPU drivers for lagging architectures. With the new Adreno supporting DX12.2 and moving to a more gaming friendly IMR rendering pipeline, it should end up a solid choice for light gaming --one doesn't buy a machine in the form factors they're targeting expecting much more than that. They really should try to win the XBox contract to get more dev. feedback / support for their GPU drivers though...