I'd rather it spin the fan all the time to improve longevity but that's just me.

One of the many reasons why snapdragon windows laptops failed was both amd and Intel (lunar lake) was able to reach the claimed efficiency of those chips. I still think modern x86 can match arm ones in efficiency if someone bothered to tune the os and scheduler for most common activities. M series was based on their phone chips which were designed from the ground up to run on a battery all these years. AMD/Intel just don't see an incentive to do that nor do Microsoft.

I have a modern AMD system on chip mini desktop that runs Linux (devuan), and have had M1/2/3 laptops. They all seem pretty comparable on power usage, especially at idle. Games and LLM load warm up the desktop and kill the laptop battery. Other than that, power consumption seems fine.

There is one exception: If I run an idle Windows 11 ARM edition VM on the mac, then the fans run pretty much all the time. Idle Linux ARM VMs don’t cause this issue on the mac.

I’ve never used windows 11 for x86. It’s probably also an energy hog.