True, though removing the battery is a good way to get around that, Geekerwan often does this or measures directly.

Or for example use an M4 Mini as in the list — and of course you can measure directly from the VRMs/board-specific power supply which is what Qualcomm (via Andrei) does on those performance/W graphs. And it is idle-normalized still, to out extra noise since you want to measure the fully active power, which NBC doesn’t have — but they got the display out at least.

However, these curves do match what we might expect and while that’s only so reassuring from an epistemological standpoint, I don’t think this is at all inferior to the completely garbage software tools people are using which are poorly modeled and missing important measurements especially when we’re talking about mobile products.

This is also a great source of overconfidence from DIY types: when you see say Oryon M or an A720 hitting a 3.5 in SpecInt at roughly 1W from Geekerwan or a Qualcomm graph, buddy that’s with the RAM, the L2, the L3 and/or SLC, any VRM or PMIC inefficiencies, etc. Same thing with Oryon L and X925 measurements or Apple P cores at 5-6W in phones from Geekerwan or Andrei.

Now sure in a laptop they’d add some losses or higher clocks but in principle the curve would be similar enough with a similar firm’s practice re: pmics/cache/etc, but we are still seeing people online not only using idiosyncratic software modeling that is often inaccurate to compare to other platforms (fine intra-OEM for some very loose stuff I guess) but even if it were accurate they’re not even using the right measurements — stripping power down further from the “package power” to the “SoC power” to the “CPU power” to lastly and most egregiously, “IA Core power/HWinfo core power/etc” where they will literally take barebones core measurements minus L2/L3/SLC/DRAM/PMICs/losses and go man “Zen 3 runs at 2-5W per core easy” and compare to like, Andrei’s M1 Mac Mini wall power of 5-8W or similar.

Apple fans have also jumped on this bandwagon ever since power metrics which is why we see some of the same behavior vs newly competing Android and Windows devices now a la “M3 consumes 4W per core at peak ST” which is probably actually true for the CPU only but again not relevant for cross-comparisons, and it is ironic for Apple fans to quote things like this when a notable part of Apple’s advantage isn’t just the raw CPU power but reducing hits to DRAM etc.

See at Geekerwan using the internal software API for CPU/SoC-only power in iPhones @ 5:04.. He actually doesn’t use these to compare to Android for the exact reasons I explained and compares via the motherboard.

Case in point? His Apple internal SoC software modeled A18 Pro P core power in Spec is 3.8W, and A18 P core 3.97W. Now, when he compares to Android, he goes from the motherboard and when idle-normalized they are 6.14 & 6.2W for the A18 Pro and A18 p cores respectively. Skip to 5:45 for motherboard.

My point being, we know what actually counts, we’ve known it for years and people like Anand La Shimpi, Ian Cutress and Andrei knew, especially for cross-platform comparisons.

People from the Intel, AMD and now even Apple’s fan base at times thanks to powermetrics (though I can’t totally blame them if PC gamers guys are going to do the same exercise) are playing things way too loose and fast for the reasons I outlined.