This was shockingly true. I had originally written (and deleted) a reply that discounted what you said not realizing that UserBenchmark had flipped the CPUs I searched for. The 2500K does legitimately stomp cheap laptops.
Yeah but you're comparing a 95 Watt 2500k Desktop CPU to a 6 Watt N4020 Celeron laptop CPU.
It's really not a fair comparison.
If you want to cite more recent cheap laptop CPUs against a 95 Watt desktop CPU, maybe something like Intel Core i5-8265U @ 1.60GHz would be a better example. It's 1.45x faster than the 2500k and consumes only 15 watts, in a $270 Dell laptop.
You know, that's a great point. I was trying to stick to what I thought was the spirit of the comparison by just grabbing the cheapest laptop I could find, but $270 is well within the "cheap" range, and the instructions per watt are significantly higher on that 8265U.
Cheap Laptop: https://www.walmart.com/ip/443153637
N4020 vs 2500K: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-vs...