Why CPUs in laptops are still weak?

[jorge_medion]

I am saving money for a new gaming laptop, I need the portability of a laptop, but I see in the last years gaming laptops have evolved to be more powerful than ever and some of them have a great performance. However, I don't understand why CPUs are still weak compared to desktop computers. I see that most gaming laptops priced between 1500 Euro and 2000 Euro have decent hard drives, good RAM memory and also very good GPUs (for such price I would be more than happy with a Nvidia GTX 1060 or GTX 1070), but I am not strongly convinced about most CPU performance. The best CPU I could find in common brands such as MSI, Asus, Lenovo, Alienware is Intel i7-8750H that while may be acceptable, seems to be the bottleneck compared with the other hardware components.

I have been researching for laptops with better CPUs than i7-8750H finding that is really difficult to find laptops with i7-8700K, usually in very specialized laptop/workstation computer builder such as Titan Computers, and the price for just this kind of CPUs rise from 4000 USD which is truly expensive for just having a better CPU. So what is the reason that laptop CPUs are weaker compared to other hardware components such as GPU?

 

[13thmonkey]

so that they are portable, the H processors have a 45W limit, vs 95W for the non H versions, (K or not).

 

[Seaweed Monster]

Hardware and performance in most laptops are limited by their form factor or thermal design. There is no point putting a super powerful CPU or GPU in a laptop if it cannot be properly cooled or play games without overheating. That is why most gaming laptops are quite thick and heavy - to allow proper cooling. Where you see powerful gaming laptops that are thin and compact, you are actually paying for the specialist engineering for that machine, as a lot of time, money and expertise is needed to be spent in order to ensure the powerful laptop they're trying to manufacture can be cooled and actually fit into a certain form factor (13.3", 14", 15.6" etc...).

Most thin and compact gaming laptops suffer from thermal throttling despite all efforts, reason being, there is only so big a fan or so much copper heat pipes you can fit into a laptop form factor. However, to 'try' and counter this, all the manufacturers/industry can do is create specialised mobile versions of desktop hardware that are less powerful and produce less heat (i.e. Max-Q, M GPU's and H, M and U modelled CPU's).

I could go on, but overall, laptop hardware has come along way, however, will never be as powerful as desktop hardware, purely down to thermals and form factor.