The only reason I've ever cared about watts is that generally speaking 120 watt and 180 watt processors require more complicated cooling solutions. That's less true today than it ever was. Cases are designed for things like liquid cooling, and they tend to be pretty silent. The processors stay cool, and are pretty reliable.
I personally stick to the lower wattage ones because I don't generally need high end stuff, so I think Apple is going the right direction here, but it should be noted that Intel has also started down the path of high performance and efficiency cores already. AMD will find itself there too if it turns out that for home use, we just don't need a ton of cores, but instead a small group of fast cores surrounded by a bunch of specialist cores.
wattage doesn't really tell you how difficult it is to cool a part anymore. 11th-gen Intel is really easy to cool despite readily going to 200W+. Zen3 is hard to cool even at 60W.
Thermal density plays a huge role, the size of the chips is going down faster than the wattage, so thermal density is going up every generation even if you keep the same number of transistors. And everyone is still putting more transistors on their chips as they shrink.
Going forward this is only going to get more complicated - I am very interested to see how the 5800X3D does in terms of thermals with a cache die over the top of the CCD (compute die). But anyway that style of thing seem to be the future - NVIDIA is also rumored to be using a cache die over the top of their Ada/Lovelace architecture. And obviously 60W direct to the IHS is easier to cool than 60W that has to be pulled through a cache die in the middle.
The Zen 3 stock coolers work pretty well. I've never had a problem.
Looking it up though I do see a lot of concerns with the heat they generate. I can only conclude I don't push my chip very hard (which, honestly, I probably don't)
I've been happy with the AMDs I purchased over the past 4 years, we'll see how they hold up and how this next gen comes out. I did see that the recent Intels are quite competitive which is good for everybody.
yup, the correct answer here is people need to stop being worried about the thermals as a metric in themselves, and look at the performance their chip is generating. If your chip is running at 90C, but you're hitting 100 ScoreMarks, and attaching a 5hp chiller to it lets you hit 105 ScoreMarks, that's not really worth it.
Yeah, longevity, blah blah, but laptop chips are designed to sit above 90C under load, it's fine.
Just saying that "how hard it is to cool" doesn't solely depend on power consumption anymore. Heat density is making that harder and harder, even if power consumption stays the same.
What does improve though is how much heat it pumps into your room. Yeah, a Rocket Lake at 200W might be roughly as hard to cool as an AMD at 90W or whatever... but one is still putting 200W into your room and the other is still putting 90W. Temperatures are not the same thing as power dissipation either. I don't like having my gaming PC running in my room during the summer, and I'm actually looking at maybe running cables through the walls to have it in the basement instead. I also have a 5700G and some NUCs that are much lower power that I prefer to use for surfing and shitposting.
> wattage doesn't really tell you how difficult it is to cool a part anymore
Sure it does. Reading the rest of your post I think you're more talking about temperature than cooling requirements, but a 200W CPU needs 200W of heat dissipation, while a 60W CPU only needs 60W of heat dissipation. It's literally a 1:1 relationship since CPUs don't do any mechanical work, so power in == heat out.
Keeping temperatures below some arbitrary number does then include things like density, IHS design, etc... But that only matters for something like Intel's "Thermal Velocity Boost" where it's really important to stay under 70C specifically instead of just avoiding thermal throttling.
The power is only relevant because it makes the machine quite in a compact form. If you've got a bit of space, then a water cooled system accomplishes a lot of the same thing. For some people there is an aesthetic element.
Power does make a big difference in data centers though - it's often the case that you run out of power before you run out of rack space.
Where power for a computer might make a difference could be in power-constrained (solar/off grid) scenarios.
I don't know if I've ever heard anyone make an argument based on $$$.
One hour of my time is more expensive than an entire month of a computer electricity bill.
Some people just want tasks to perform as fast as possible regardless of power consumption or portability.
Life's short and time is finite.
Every second adds up for repetitive tasks.