The A11 is on a smaller die size and yet the battery usage has actually regressed from that of an A10 [1]. Additionally, the displays do draw a lot of power, but so does video processing and games and the A11 doesn't seem to offer that much of an advantage, if any from a battery perspective, than the A10.
My pencil has lower power consumption than all of them. It also processes zero instructions per second.
The ability to ramp up your speed at the cost of higher power consumption is a feature, not a bug. You finish the workload faster and therefore the total energy consumed will be lower.
It's funny that no serious person from Qualcomm who works on Snapdragon will with straight face support your point of view about the processor comparison. In fact, they would shit their pants looking at A9 in 2017, let alone A11. I know cause I have talked to a couple. :)
The SD 835 and A11 are sort of out of sequence in release cycles as the SD 835 is over 7-8 months old. A better comparison would be between the A11 and SD 845.
As for Qualcomm, they're really not an innovator in the SoC space as they just take whatever ARM gives them and add their modifications. The ARM A75 cores in the new Q1 2018 SoC's will exceed the multicore of the A11 and be about 25% slower in single core I predict.
