IIRC few months ago I saw diagrams like this one below showed the power requirement of RPL platform, it was 300 watts just for a CPU. Looks like this would become new normal for Intel platform......
The reason there is so much arguing/discussion over power draw is because it is a rather complex subject and it not only is dependent on the CPU but also on the subjective usage of a particular user. For example, is your CPU normally idling along and now and then you do something like apply a PS filter, or pre-render a few seconds of video and your power draw spikes to 250W but only for a few seconds. For many people with their usage that is fine as they want the most compute possible for "bursty" workloads.
On the other hand if you are constantly engaging all CPU's for distributed computing or video encoding or rendering then you are going to be concerned with overall efficiency.. aka how many kWHrs to complete the job?
So now you get into the nuance of the situation. Person A is idling his rig 99% of the time but the other 1% it's drawing 250Watts. While person B is running his rig full out 99% of the time. Of course absolute efficiency is going to be more important to person B. Meanwhile if the "less efficient" CPU in person A's rig is faster for those bursty workloads then his/her time is more important than any insignificant power usage since he/she's only hitting it hard 1% of the time.
Then you have to factor in that manufacturers set up CPU's and Motherboards for what they think most people will want/need. But we know better and can set power/frequency limits for a particular CPU so it fits our work flow best. Then you throw price into the equation and things become even more complicated.
Zen 3 and Alder Lake are competitive, very competitive. In order to analyze efficiency I think you would have to take a specific application and run it at various frequencies/voltages, see how fast it is and then make comparisons. That's why power arguments go on forever here. You can always find a spot on the curve that supports your side of argument.
"Yeah but at this frequency this CPU is this fast."
"But that's not stock, this one is more efficient at stock."
"But settings are there to change."
"True but we were comparing out of the box..."
And on and on...
I think Raptor Lake and Zen 4 are going to be just as competitive as Zen 3 and ADL. The fact that they have radically different architectures means that there are going to be 1,000 ways to frame an argument.
So, in conclusion I think when talking about efficiency we need to be very specific in order to avoid endless debate. As in "This CPU can do this rate of work on this application while drawing this much power."
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