$2k laptops now days come with 16 cores. They are thermally limited, but they are going to get you 60-80% the perf of their desktop counterparts.

The real limit is on the Nvidia cards. They are cut down a fair bit, often with less VRAM until you really go up in price point.

They also come with NPUs but the docs are bad and none of the local LLM inference engines seem to use the NPU, even though they could in theory be happy running smaller models.