There are a lot of efficient PC's available. My HTPC sleeps when not playing and when streaming 1080p/4k videos only uses about 25 watts... which isn't bad considering its streaming from a NAS with plex through to an Xbox One.
Phones, on the other hand, are highly specialized - PC's are general purpose. Trade off is often power requirements and performance.
My 8 core 16 thread Ryzen Gaming PC smokes anything my phone can do and i guess if i really wanted to compare i could do a taskper watt calculation and see how they compare.
When i use my phone like a computer, its power draw increases and i get just a couple hours of battery use. play fortnite on your phone and it goes dead quick.
It’s also a consequence of constraints. There has not been a pressure to make desktops more energy efficient, since they’re attached to a permanent source of incredibly cheap power. Even laptops spend a large portion of their time wired in.
Phones on the other hand are rarely plugged in, and consumers clearly demand more battery life. This has led to resources being poured into cell phone battery capacity and into efficiencies in power usage.
I agree with your point, but I run a cluster of 6 ODroid systems (running an Emby server (which only runs on one of the nodes)) , and even then it peaks at around 50 watts last time I measured (the hard drive array is separate and peaks at around 30).
I haven't done a ton of side-by-side comparisons, but it does feel like ARM runs more efficiently per watt.
I suppose something like an i7 or Ryzen would be mostly idle running a similar load, and would consume a comparable amount of power, plus a lot of power to keep its hi-perf features, like huge caches and other, idling cores, up and ready to take load any nanosecond it arrives.
Phone SoCs specifically address that by having 2+ CPUs of varied power, and having the high-power CPUs completely shut down and powered off when idle.
Same applies to GPU cores that eat significant power when idle, and a lot of power when fully loaded. A PC with a 600W PSU likely features a large GPU that can consume e.g. 300W under full load, doing 60fps photorealistic rendering, or training a neural network. Phones just don't have this kind of hardware (they have much smaller ans less complex GPUs), and, again, manage to keep them powered down when not in use.
Again, a PC drawing 50W or less while doing light office work is a pretty normal thing.
It is definitely the case that pushing raw performance erodes perf / watt on a given process and architecture. You could slightly underclock and moderately undervolt many CPUs or GPUs to see a fairly significant gain in perf / watt.
Phones, on the other hand, are highly specialized - PC's are general purpose. Trade off is often power requirements and performance.
My 8 core 16 thread Ryzen Gaming PC smokes anything my phone can do and i guess if i really wanted to compare i could do a taskper watt calculation and see how they compare.
When i use my phone like a computer, its power draw increases and i get just a couple hours of battery use. play fortnite on your phone and it goes dead quick.