eli5 – Why are ‘System on a Chip’ computer’s potentially faster?
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They’re not necessarily faster, that’s entirely dependent upon the components you put into your SoC, and will never match the high power discrete chips due to heat limitations
SoCs are more power and space efficient because its all in one module. There’s one set of power management circuitry and only one physical thing placed on the board. This matters for things like phones where you’re trying to minimize standby power to eek a bit more life out of the battery and minimize space so you can fit in more battery.
They can be a bit faster than expected because they can have custom interconnects between the chips. If your PC has a separate CPU and GPU then they have to talk through a PCI-e connection because that’s the standard. If you put them together in the same package then you can have them talk through a custom standard that can support more data and let you eek out a bit more performance
In the end though, a SoC will never out perform a discrete CPU and GPU because it just can’t handle the heat created by putting multiples of the really big chips together in a package. Heat is actually what limits the peak performance we can get out of chips these days
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