HDR Panorama Stitching LRC 12.1 and MacOS 13.2 Broken

I recently acquired new 16" M2 Max Macbook Pro, with 96GB of RAM, 38-core GPU and 4TB of storage.  I'm doing some comparative testing and it appears that something is now broken with HDR Panorama stitching, but only on the MacBook Pros.  I am repeating tests I did back in March of 2022 on MacOS 12.x and Lightroom 11.x (whatever was current for both at that time).  Across the board the new M2 Max is faster than the previous MacBook Pro (16" M1 Max Macbook Pro, with 64GB of RAM, 32-core GPU and 4TB of storage); overall speed ranges from 9% to 37% faster depending on the task.  

That said, when I went to test a set of HDR Panoramas, I found that the performance was terrible.  I then tried the same test on the previous generation 16" M1 Max and it was also awful--way worse than it was back in March 2022 on the same machine.  However, when I perform the same test on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio, there are no performance changes at all--it's basically identical to the scores I got back in March of 2022.  When I launch the Activity Monitor, Lightroom is basically not using any CPU or GPU power at all.  

My only guess here is that something is amiss on the laptops that causes them to not spin up the CPUs and that its related to the battery/power management features, which of course the Studios don't have since they are mains power only. That said, changing the Battery settings to "High Power" doesn't make any difference.