Both Qualcomm and Mediatek have caught up on the phone SoC market.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has a slightly better CPU than the A19 Pro but a slightly worse GPU. Apple has a very slight advantage in watt usage but that's more than offset by the battery gap. Same thing with the Dimensity 9500.
One, you are entirely moving the goal post. Nothing was said of winning. The discussion was about catching up and catching up they did. As I said, the market is competitive.
Two, because the actual power consumption is not 65% higher - that's peak - and high end Chinese phones have batteries significantly bigger than the iPhone so you still get better screen time between charges in the end.
I think it’s fair to say that a SoC should perform better at higher wattages, so my comment is definitely relevant.
Regardless, I don’t understand how you can say that I’m moving goalposts when I mention performance per watt, which is absolutely relevant when talking about smartphone SoC performance, and then you bring up battery capacity, which is not.
Your initial question was "How are they on par SoC-wise?"
They are on par because they now sometimes beat Apple top of the line A-chips on performance be it single core, multicores or GPU and do so within a power budget which allows the phone they ship in to be competitive screen-on time wise.
Apple doesn't have a one generation lead anymore which is a huge change compared to only three years ago.
You are moving the goalposts because the discussion was always about the gap between Apple and its competitors and you have entirely shifted to peak consumption when it was clear the conclusion would not be the one you want/expect.
The whole claim that Qualcomm is on par with Apple predicates upon results from benchmarking tools, which stress CPU and GPU and thus induce peak power consumption.
If we were to look at more thorough reviews, e.g. Geekerwan, they always include TDP and power consumption, because that gives the necessary context to understand the results.
And obviously I’m not denying that Mediatek and Qualcomm have massively improved their designs, but they aren’t on par when we account all the things that matter.
Your argument is that, since manufacturers are putting larger batteries in phones, SoC power consumption shouldn’t matter. That is moving the goalpost, because you introduce a variable that should be irrelevant to SoC performance testing to dismiss my observation.
Both Qualcomm and Mediatek have caught up on the phone SoC market.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has a slightly better CPU than the A19 Pro but a slightly worse GPU. Apple has a very slight advantage in watt usage but that's more than offset by the battery gap. Same thing with the Dimensity 9500.
The SoC market is now extremely competitive.