It's actually this idling power which is what defines battery drain for most people. All these benchmarks about how much it can for a certain compute intensive task is not that important considering that most of the time a laptop is doing almost nothing.

We just stare at an article in a web browser. We look at a text document. We type a bit in the document. An app is doing an HTTP request. The CPU is doing nothing basically.

Once in a while it has to redraw something, do some intense processing of an image or text, but it takes seconds.

It's the 99% in idling that counts and there most laptop CPU's suck.

Even when watching a video the CPU is not (should not be) doing much as there are HW co-processors for MPEG-4 decoding built in.

It's quite embarrassing how AMD and Intel have screwed up honestly.