Would we say the Zen 4 core design is less efficient because AMD is going to start bundling an integrated GPU with Ryzen chips, or would we just talk about Zen 4 core power draw vs Zen 3?
Apple's performance cores managed to improve performance while cutting power.
What other iterative core design did this?
It helps to remember that Apple isn't playing the performance via clock increases no matter what happens to power and heat game.
I guess that's where the misunderstanding comes from. I was not talking about CPU cores alone. Only M1, M2 as a whole.
But I still am not sure if I can believe that the M2 CPU improved performance while at the same time cutting power. Can you link to some analysis? Would be very interesting. Though please not the A15 one, the cores are related but not the same and the CPUs have big differences.
Apple hardware updates are always and only moderate incremental improvements, since the very beginning. Apple is reasonably predictable in this regard. It is unrealistic to expect a generational and exponential leap in performance or efficiency in any of Apple's hardware refreshes. That has never happened, and it likely never will. What happens instead is whatever model gets a little bit better than the last revision. The M1 was not a massive leap forward, but instead an impressive lateral move. Subsequent Apple Silicon chips will only be a smidgen better than the newest previous revision.
Would we say the Zen 4 core design is less efficient because AMD is going to start bundling an integrated GPU with Ryzen chips, or would we just talk about Zen 4 core power draw vs Zen 3?
Apple's performance cores managed to improve performance while cutting power.
What other iterative core design did this?
It helps to remember that Apple isn't playing the performance via clock increases no matter what happens to power and heat game.