> Presumably, adding more cores to a mobile processor when you switch to desktop and can handle proportionally higher TDP, while not trivial, is not especially

> Presumably, adding more cores to a mobile processor when you switch to desktop and can handle proportionally higher TDP, while not trivial, is not especially difficult either. Multi-core scaling past a relatively low number is extremely difficult. AMD & Intel both have complex interconnect fabrics to handle this. You can see an example of this with Intel's shift from a ring bus to a router mesh design: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-revi... Or AMD's new chiplet design with Epyc 2 of the IO die + core dies connected via InfinityFabric. > iMac 27-inch retina (iMac18,3) has the i7-7700K at 4.2 GHz, score ~5700. Be careful with those clock speeds because the Intel Core i7-8700B @ 3.2 GHz shows a nearly identical score. And just below that supposedly the Intel Core i9-8950HK @ 2.9 GHz comes in just a bit lower at 5348 And the Intel Xeon W-2170B @ 2.5 GHz scored 5100. Higher than the A12X at the same clocks. That'd suggest Intel has an IPC advantage. Of course the reality here is that the clock listed on that page are complete nonsense. It's not the clocks the CPU was running at while running the benchmark, which is a hugely important data point to have here given the variety in boost frequencies at different thermal/power situations. The i7-7700k wasn't running at 4.2ghz, it was probably running at 4.5ghz. And the i7-8700B wasn't running at 3.2ghz, it was probably running at 4.6ghz. So depending on the actual clocks during the run the resulting scores may be more or less impressive. Similarly we don't know the actual power draw during those runs, which since we're talking about power efficiency here matters quite a bit.