The most obvious way you can tell QC has a better architecture is that, like Apple, they really can just scale well with both core counts and idle power. They don’t even have E Cores yet, and when they do that’ll be another boost here even if is just shrunken P Cores (see AMD’s thing which does give them efficiency boosts at some clocks).
Intel is going to rely very heavily on their E Cores I think way more than Apple does, and they probably won’t quite match Arm’s or Apples and quite frankly, I suspect that Qualcomm’s P Cores (including SoC power anyways) are about as efficient at the same performance level — which is another key difference between Intel’s P and Cortex X, Apple’s cores, and Qualcomm’s which actually still can perform well going pretty low. Apple’s E Cores have a genuine lead in their case over the P cores, but the A7x vs X lead is a bit smaller and a bit more about area and needing every last drop for phones — if any of these three wanted to ship P Cores only in laptops, they could still get solid battery results (diminished for Apple for sure ofc) albeit it’s a less area-efficient way to do things.
This is made most obvious by…. Qualcomm’s own claims. They can ship a 12C standard part that can compete with Intel’s LNL and then AMD’s Strix on both ends.
Anyway, on some level Intel still has to fix their ringbus and P core issues, or they need to move to a different fabric structure. LNL is a good crutch though and an excellent step forward.
Before someone says this is what Apple does — that is false, on MacOS. There is a ramping and software (with GCD, a hierarchy of QoS) element to core utilization but “most real workloads” do not stay isolated to the E Cores, you can just watch this yourself in light use. They get a ton of use but it’s not this dramatic. The reason Intel will make a different tradeoff is because their P cores and the ring they’re on are too bloated, and also don’t scale down very well, and their E Cores are faster than Apple’s*.
*Apple E core Spec results are like in the 2.5-3.5 range around .5-.8W, Intel’s MTL LP E Cores are similar at peak, but drawing 5+W. LNL Skymont LPE cores give a 1.7x perf uplift iso-power or a 2x uplift at more power. Putting them at like 5.5 to 6.5 SpecInt performance, depending on power.
Interesting times ahead tbh.