Surely they meant peak MT performance, so the power consumption of M2 Max in an MT test would be what mattered not the power consumption of a single core.
They did not mean peak MT performance because it will likely lose by a bit or won't look as impressive I guess. More importantly it won't cost as much as an M3 Max system with a similar RAM/SSD configuration, and a lot of people just want something with great battery life and great peak CPU performance.
To further expound, I doubt finding an X Elite system will cost as much as an M3 14" MBP system (which starts at $1599 for 8GB of RAM...)
for similar specifications - and there are in fact people who use Apple hardware more recently solely for the hardware, battery life. It'll compete more with AMD's Phoenix though, contra initial predictions of a huge die size and cost. See below for more on all this^1.
Because the performance of M2 Max = performance of M2 Pro = performance of M2 in single threaded tests since they are the same cores and clocked the same
Nope, this is not the case.
The M2 Max is clocked to about 3.7GHz and will score into the 2050+ range on GB5 ST. M2 and M2 Pros are clocked to about 3.5GHz on ST and usually are about 100-200 points behind. It's enough to where the base M2 -> M2 Max gap is almost 8-9% when you look at the best, which checks out based on the clocks and probably some scheduling/ramping differentiation.
It's odd, I know, but it's what they did.
They used the M2 Max's ST probably because they knew they could opportunistically compete with it, and because it represented Apple's absolute best ST on benchmarks by 5-10%. Plausibly, also because it has a bit more overhead (just slightly) which makes an iso-performance efficiency comparison more favorable. Their point is they can indeed match Apple's best and beefiest on the ST CPU performance and efficiency. This graphic was paired well with another ST comparison to Intel's 13980HK (I forget which one it was, but a 13th generation 5.6GHz chip) where they matched it with 65% less power iso-performance. Those were the two ST perf/W comparisons they gave.
ST performance/watt is a big deal for mobile products even in this vein and the comparison made sense.
1: The die on the X Elite is around 170mm^2 per Charlie and SemiAccurate (smaller than a 178mm^2 7840U/HS even). It's an M2 or 7840U-class chip on the cost structure front in terms of the 128B bus and die size, but the CPU performance can substantially beat the former and latter and still size up for efficiency, most likely idle power too vs AMD.
First and foremost it's a competitor for AMD and Intel's mainstream monolithic dice or the M2/3 - and yes, Apple actually do sell the M3 in a beefier, better cooled profile as Apple showed with the 14" MBP M3 for $1599 or the Mac Mini soon - before someone says "but that's only for iPads/Airs" (no, not exclusively).
So people saying "it loses to the M3 Pro/Max by a hare or a lot" are kind of missing the plot I think, and I understand why they paired an M2 Max ST comparison with an M2 MT comparison. They are just opportunistically saying they can compete with the best that was out at the time of the presentation on at least one thing, and to the extent someone says hey, the M2 Max wins by a hair on MT? Or M3 Max blows it out now?
So what - X Elite systems won't cost as much and they aren't weighed down by the bus and GPU area Apple have, it's not going for that market. It's more like a vastly better version of AMD's Phoenix tbh.
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