People have weird beliefs about performance. A laptop can sustain desktop-like performance for short periods (tens of seconds) before they must throttle back b

People have weird beliefs about performance. A laptop can sustain desktop-like performance for short periods (tens of seconds) before they must throttle back because of heat limits. For sustained maximum performance you need the ability to dissipate lots of power for extended periods. A laptop that can dissipate 50w is naturally going to have close to half the performance of a desktop expelling double that. For the most part, there is no technical differences between a laptop and a desktop processor other than the TDP target. For most applications, though, this difference is irrelevant. You need to be doing something computationally expensive for an extended (10+ seconds) period for a desktop to be a sensible choice for performance reasons.