It's long been possible (since Alder Lake at the latest) to tune Intel CPUs for task energy consumption competitive with Apple Silicon, but bone-headed OEMs including Apple always tuned them the other way, wasting a lot of power for tiny performance gains. It is inappropriate to say that you evaluated the perf per watt on a Core Ultra 7 265K because what you really evaluated was how HP, Lenovo, or Dell configured that chip. But for years it has been the case that with one of the Atom variants (Gracemont, Skymont, ___mont) tuned to non-ridiculous scaling modes (capped at 2GHz, say) the energy story is quite good. The Apple platform does not have eager scaling and this is part of their efficiency story.
Max power Intel consumer chips are already losing to Apple chips in raw performance, especially ST. Tuning them for better perf/watt by turning down the Ghz would just make them even less competitive in performance.
- Performance
- Performance/watt
- Die area
These are the 3 things determine a competitive chip. You can increase perf/watt but decrease performance. You can increase performance by giving the chip a lot of cache and transistors but it's more costly to manufacture.
The problem is that Intel chips are losing in all 3 areas simultaneously against Apple chips. They are slower, less efficient, and the CPU cores are bigger physically.