How am I supposed to interpret this? A MacBook Air surpasses my i7-8700k in single and (almost) multi core performance?
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Intel is now #3
Check out for example the per core power charts that Anandtech does: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...
Compare for example the 1 core power numbers between the chips. The 5600X 1 core result is 11w @ 4.6ghz, whereas the other two chips boost higher and hit 4.8-4.9ghz 1 core turbos, but it costs 17-18w to do it. Huge increase in power for that last 1-2% performance. So you really can't or shouldn't compare more power-concious configurations with the top end desktop where power is infinite and well worth spending for even single digit percentage gains.
And then of course you should also note that the single-core power draw in all of those is vastly lower than their TDP numbers (65w for the 5600x, and 125w for the 5800x/5900x).
Yeah comparing TDP is meaningless even within the same processor. The 4 core workload in this table uses 94W and the 16 core workload uses 98W. There is also an anomaly at 5 cores where the CPU uses less power than if it only used 4 cores.
If you tried to derive conclusions about the power efficiency of the CPU you would end up making statements like "This CPU is 3-4 times more power efficient than itself"
