Not so much AMD's side, their Rembrandt chips are very efficient, their desktop chips are more efficient than Intel's too and there's no doubt their GPUs will win on efficiency too with the upcoming generation.... I'd be willing to bet that AMD could push efficiency even more if it wasn't for Intel and Nvidia producing seriously power hungry chips and basically requiring AMD to follow suit to compete on total performance. From AMD's point of view, the fact that consumers are buying Intel' s Alder lake and Nvidia GPUs and will continue to buy Raptor lake and Lovelace despite atrocious power consumption signals to them that efficiency doesn't sell, so why bother down that path.
BTW, this is a PERFECT example of the rebound effect (the observation that technological gains in efficiency have literally never resulted in a net decrease in energy consumption), and how the "free market" fails at delivering what is needed now more than ever: lower NET power consumption. I know most people would scream bloody murder, but perhaps there should be greater regulation on power consumption for consumer CPUs and GPUs... In the current environment this would produce a huge advantage for AMD though (testing in reviews have shown that when Rembrandt and Alder lake mobile chips are limited to 15w, for example, the Rembrandt chip outperforms Alder lake and based on all the reports that Nvidia is pushing Lovelace power consumption to the absolute limit because they think they need to to beat RDNA3, if GPUs were power limited it probably negatively impact Nvidia), so it would undoubtedly result in companies like Nvidia and Intel, but many more as well and probably even AMD just so that they have increased power limits as an option, lobbying and legally bribing (i.e. Campaign contributions) government officials to prevent such a necessary measure.
Anyway, x86 does NOT have to be inefficient, and can perform most of that most people require with low power consumption. Maybe not as well as ARM in some applications, but perhaps in the future something can be altered with x86 to address that.
