the problem with Go is that there's little data and the game is more complex - but given the small sizes of the deepmind NNs if they generate billions of meaningful games, they could probably compress their model and require less searching thus less energy
That would be an interesting matchup. I bet a grandmaster could play slow enough to kill the battery on the phone. A human could go a day without eating no problem. There's no way the phone could go a day without charging while running 100% CPU.
Speculative move generation of a chess engine on opponent time is a huge part of the overall strength especially when the engine can see a forced move therby collapsing the tree.
[0] Don't try this at home.
I would think a smart phone consumes less power than the brain (more so if you can turn off the display appropriately). I could be wrong though. BTW does all of the komodo logic reside on the client side or some of it executes on the off-client backend ?