I don't buy this as an explanation for the gap in the actual silicon's performance.

Nvidia's chips lose very little performance when they're severely power limited. In fact, that's why Nvidia's Professional versions of their GPUs are typically running at under two-thirds of their consumer equivalent's power draw.

Nvidia's cards are primarily designed for their professional applications where the power consumption is lower, and then they just juice up the consumer cards deep into the territory of diminishing returns just so they win some benchmarks.

On a performance-per-watt basis, Apple is still behind an Nvidia card with the juiced up power consumption, and when you dial back the power draw, Nvidia cards are miles ahead of Apple's silicon for performance-per-watt.

> On a performance-per-watt basis, Apple is still behind an Nvidia card with the juiced up power consumption, and when you dial back the power draw, Nvidia cards are miles ahead of Apple's silicon for performance-per-watt.

Do you have a citation on Apple vs nVidia performance-per-watt? I'm not aware of any benchmark that shows nVidia with a better performance-per-watt. Higher performance, sure, but performance-per-watt, not that I'm aware of.