I’d be more inclined to the argument that “ASi and s just bad at simd” if the bench results weren’t an order of magnitude lower. If it was beaten by the competition by 50 or even 75%, then yeah, might be right. But when the results are that bad something’s way off.
It doesn’t help that the matter is deliberately brought up by a troll.
If their power draw is increasing, as rumored, I have a difficult time seeing the point of shoving more cores down the throat. I’m of the sentiment that a laptop shouldn’t roast my lap and need to be tethered to an outlet.
Also, the era you refer to had a similar problem, you could theoretically throw as many cores into a laptop as you like but there’s a point of diminishing returns. See: no G5 PowerBook
On the topic of diminishing returns, having that many cores seems to only benefit video and 3d rendering in benchmarks that I’ve seen. This may change in the future, but having 32 cores in a laptop seems beyond the pale. As other programmers said to me “1 woman can make a baby in 9 months, but 9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month.”
And as an aside, Apple silicon is very competitive with 16 core, 32 thread cpus with only 10 cores (only 8 performance cores). So why would Apple specifically need to reach core count parity when they manage with nearly half the cores at all?