Intel Core i7 12700K

That's just it. My 12700k has maximum turbo of 190 watts. But it has giant air HSF that was trivial to install and I don't even HEAR the thing. No problems! Same with the 300watt gpu. My Athlon 1100 was barely a third tdp at 60watts, yet was perilous to install, broke one (almost $1k, in 2001 money!), and then on the replacement had a 6500rpm screamer jet engine under my desk sitting on mobo that barely supported it and which could fail and kill my 1core cpu at any point :0

Fellow 12700k owner, I am very impressed with the idle power consumption. Mine reports idle at ~7W, which is pretty close to my laptop's R7 4750U. Came from an R5 2600, which I'm almost positive idled higher. While the full-core power consumption is quite excessive, I think Intel overall does a good job of efficiency under idle/light load.

> Single core clock speed hasn't changed in over 10 years now? Technically we have gone from 3.3gz- 3.9gz base frequency, 4.1-4.2 single core boosts, 4.7ghz heavy OC in Haswell to 4.3 and 3.0 base clock for efficiency/perf cores, with boosts to 5.4 ish, stable 5.8ghz all core frequency with heavy OC, and even pushing 6.something GHz single core with a good setup. But then again, this is on the more extreme ends. Mainstream laptops have remained relatively stable. re Python MP: On my 12700k, I saw almost linear scaling (per core, not thread) with multiprocessing when loading stuff from the disk for ML applications and processing. This was with the datasets library.

I'm not sure about S3. I'm happy to say for my purposes, including travel and extended time away from an outlet, it "just works" out of the box. It's my main device, rarely off for more than 8 hours, so I don't know how much it would deplete over time while suspended and off power. It's been a long while since I've seen any problems on Thinkpads with suspend, and I've got better rabbit holes to spend my time in than trying to tweak that. I don't bear an absolute grudge against Intel, but they really need to get their act together when it comes to laptop chips, the AMD chip is a dream compared to the Intel chips I've used in laptops for the past few years (my desktop 12700k is just fine, though). 130g is inconsequential, it feels very light and well distributed. After all the struggles, and a financial hit selling the X1 two years earlier than planned because it was just unusable, I had to determine, for now, the compromises of the Intel X1 series are not worth it, though they would probably be fine with an AMD chip. I do miss a touch screen and very occasionally convertible modes, though.

Those Dell XPS are no better than an Intel Macbook, they're designed by people who can't put function before form and consistently screw up their hardware design enough to avoid like the plague. I'm not the least bit surprised they didn't pick the right chip for the job, two years ago it was Dell sending out emails to XPS owners warning them not to leave it asleep in a bag for risk of permanent damage... I've tried a few Alder Lake laptops now (and daily-drive a 12700k desktop), and I don't really have any complaints about the thermals. Gaming, music production, video editing, none of it can seem to push the CPU past 40c under extended load. It's a solid chip that stands toe-to-toe with it's contemporaries, and I reckon it's going to get scarily good once Intel transitions it from 10nm++ to 5nm.

My 12700K has core power usage under 1W and package power under 4W when it's just sitting there, which is does a heck of a lot of. When it's running flat out compiling C++ projects on all performance cores, package power is ~90W. Single-threaded performance is much better than any Ryzen and even beats my M1 Pro. I'm not really seeing the energy argument for desktop/workstation usage. For datacenter TCO AMD is probably still the champ.