Anyone else think E cores on Intel's desktop CPUs have mostly been a failure?

Posted by Wander715@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 352 comments

We are now 3+ years out from Intel implementing big.LITTLE architecture on their desktop lineup with 12th gen and I think we've yet to see an actual benefit for most consumers. I've used a 12600K over that time and have found the E cores to be relatively useless and only serve to cause problems with things like proper thread scheduling in games and Windows. There are many instances where I'll try to play games on the CPU and get some bad stuttering and poor 1% and .1% framedrops and I'm convinced at least part of the time it's due to scheduling issues with the E cores. Initially Intel claimed the goal was to improve MT performance and efficiency. Sure MT performance is good on the 12th/13th/14th gen chips but overkill for your average consumer. The efficiency goal fell to the wayside fast with 13th and 14th gen as Intel realized drastically ramping up TDP was the only way they'd compete with AMD on the Intel 7 node. Just looking to have a discussion and see what others think. I think Intel has yet to demonstrate that big.LITTLE is actually useful and needed on desktop CPUs. They were off to a decent start with 12th gen but I'd argue the jump we saw there was more because of the long awaited switch from 14nm to Intel 7 and not so much the decision to implement P and E cores. Overall I don't see the payoff that Intel was initially hoping for and instead it's made for a clunky architecture with inconsistent performance on Windows.

Reply to Post

Reply

352 Comments

[-]

LeTanLoc98@reddit

Intel faces two major challenges when upgrading to more powerful CPUs: 1. Heat generation 2. Insufficient cache E-cores are incredibly useful for me. If you look at the CPU die, you'll see that for the same die area, Intel can fit either one P-core or three E-cores. Since modern operating systems handle a vast number of concurrent processes, having a high core count is a huge advantage. Not to mention, the E-cores on my i7-14700K can boost up to 4.3 GHz (I've overclocked them slightly to 4.5 GHz), which is very powerful. However, Intel’s CPUs often lack enough cache to fully unleash their potential. The real issue is that operating systems and software are not yet fully optimized for E-cores.

Reply

[-]

crawler54@reddit

"We are now 3+ years out from Intel implementing big.LITTLE architecture on their desktop lineup with 12th gen... There are many instances where I'll try to play games on the CPU and get some bad stuttering and poor 1% and .1% framedrops" so you are blaming "stuttering" in games on intel e-cores? while providing no proof whatsoever? oh geez

Reply

[-]

HobartTasmania@reddit

Well actually, as I understand it Windows 10 apparently can't tell the difference between P and E cores so this may be where the problem lies in that it schedules in an E core when it should have allocated a P core when gaming. Windows 11 can tell the difference and supposedly knows not to do this.

Reply

[-]

crawler54@reddit

he was talking about gaming, not o.s. differences, he said nothing about win10 vs. win11, nor even what o.s. he was personally using. it's rather hilarious that he's got 240 thumbs-up for idle speculation that he failed to prove.

Reply

[-]

MaksDampf@reddit

I think P-Cores are a failure. If you look at the PPA it is devastating. E-Cores have almost the same IPC as P-Cores, at least in Integer workloads they have. It is clockspeed that is missing to close the gap and the wider FPU of the P-cores. You can cram 3x E-Cores into the space of one P-Core, yet they deliver 70% the performance while consuming less power. Instead of the the lacklustre 285K we could have had a 32Core E-Core CPU with a beefy GPU. It would not have won any gaming benchmarks, but neither does the 285k. But it would have absolutely destroyed AMD in Multithreaded workloads by more than 50% and probably also efficiency. I think Intel needs to ditch the cove Cores and continue on improcing the E-Cores. Maybe make a Mont Core with a private L2, a big fat floating point unit and use high performance cell libraries to make it clock above 5Ghz?

Reply

[-]

hackenclaw@reddit

I wouldnt call P-cores a complete failure. I think Intel should have shrink the P-cores count to only Four P-cores. Use that die saving, slap them with large amount of Cache. That would have win gaming benchmark and still keep a decent multi-core performance.

Reply

[-]

phire@reddit

Problem is that we are comparing performance-optimised Core-cores with efficiency optimised Mont-cores. What happens if intel actually made performance-optimised Mont-cores? Gave them a 256bit wide FPU, more cache and allows them to boost past 5ghz? Rough estimates suggest we are talking about a Mont core with that's now half the area of the Cove-coress, but 95% of the performance. At that point, it's getting really hard to justify keeping the Cove cores around, we just have two types of P cores, one with twice the area for just 5% more performance? A few more years of performance-focused improvements might result in Mont-cores that are 0% faster than the equivalent Cove-cores, while only using 60% of the area. There is zero point in keeping the Cove-cores at that point. That's why the Cove-cores (P-cores) are a failure. They have been tuned for performance, use 3x the area, yet they are only 70% better than the efficiency tuned Mont cores (E-core). At this point, the Cove-cores are actually holding back the development of the Mont-cores.

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

Nah, the Atom team has been green-lit to turn Atom into a P-core (“Unified Core”). Unless Haifa pulls off another political miracle to get management to backtrack on this, Cove is dead.

Reply

[-]

RegularCircumstances@reddit

What? Royal Cove is dead anyway, and I thought the P core Cove team is about to supplant the Atom team and Intel is done with them?

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

No, the big core team is being embarrassed by the Atom team, and management isn’t blind to that. With E-cores off the roadmap now, the Atom team has refocused on designing a P-core. The big core team will try to contest this of course, but PPA-wise Atom will crush them. As it stands right now, Intel’s plan is to have Atom take over.

Reply

[-]

RegularCircumstances@reddit

Yes of course they will re crush them, but my general understanding from Intel over the years and leaks is that that P core team is too politically powerful internally, and now they’re not even that competitive, even when the gun is up against them.

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

They’re indeed politically powerful, but numbers don’t lie. The Atom team is just too far ahead. Don’t get me wrong, the Atom team might still be eventually disbanded if they become completely overpowered politically. I’m just explaining why they received this chance to design a P-core.

Reply

[-]

phire@reddit

This rumoured unified core is called Griffin Cove. So it's a Cove core (a P core), not a Mont core. Though, we have no idea what "unified" actually means. It could be fundamentally the Mont uarch, that was relabelled to Cove for political reasons. It could be a true unification, taking the best from Mont and Cove. Or maybe they just managed to make the Cove arch efficient enough that they could dump the Mont arch altogether.

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

Griffin Cove is being designed by the P core team. That’s not what I’m referring to.

Reply

[-]

phire@reddit

Oh, I hadn't heard anything about that. Now I'm feeling optimistic. Though, it does make me wonder what Griffin cove actually is. Is it actually efficient enough to take on the role of the E cores? Or did they simply remove the E cores from whatever Lake?

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

Not too sure which Lake Griffin will intercept, but what is for sure is that Razor Lake (2027) will be the last Lake with E cores. I think Griffin Cove being the P core in Razor Lake is quite likely. The decision to get rid of E cores was a cost-saving measure, not one based on technical merit. And Griffin Cove likely isn’t anything special PPA-wise; I have no faith in the P-core team’s ability to execute.

Reply

[-]

RegularCircumstances@reddit

The P core team is a total joke. I don’t think AMD is drastically better vs Arm or Qualcomm or Apple when we consider power/performance/area from a CPU-wide perspective at all, but they’re better than Intel for sure by a mile and using less resources.

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

Agreed. Sad to see how far they’ve fallen since the Sandy Bridge days. But the rot was inevitable after their Oregon counterpart was disbanded in 2012. No competition = no reason to try.

Reply

[-]

TwelveSilverSwords@reddit

Yay. Btw, where is the Atom team based at? Austin?

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

Yeah, Austin.

Reply

[-]

Slyons89@reddit

I think you overestimate the ability of operating systems schedulers to put the right threads onto the right cores. Having 4 extremely fast cores with cache isn't that useful if gaming threads keep get shuffled off to the e-cores. It already happens on the 8 P core models.

Reply

[-]

gatorbater5@reddit

that's sorta-kinda how zen2 worked, right? keep the game on one chiplet, with a heap of L3 cache. multicore used both chiplets. it wasn't marketed as such, but that's how it worked. it's why the 3300x performed like a 3700x despite having half the cores. (this is as much a question as it is an assertion; i want to be corrected or better informed)

Reply

[-]

xpk20040228@reddit

Because desktop P core cannot use AVX512. On the other hand, Intel 's AVX implementation are just bad either way, so not much loss there

Reply

[-]

xCAI501@reddit

> I think P-Cores are a failure. If you look at the PPA it is devastating. > E-Cores have almost the same IPC as P-Cores, at least in Integer workloads they have. > It is clockspeed that is missing to close the gap and the wider FPU of the P-cores in AVX workloads. But that's the point, you can't just clock E-cores higher and keep the same IPC! You need the additional resources of the P-cores to mitigate the even larger gap between core and memory speed.

Reply

[-]

cuttino_mowgli@reddit

> E-Cores have almost the same IPC as P-Cores, at least in Integer workloads they have. > It is clockspeed that is missing to close the gap and the wider FPU of the P-cores in AVX workloads. > You can cram 3x E-Cores into the space of one P-Core, yet a single one delivers 70% of the performance while consuming less power. Then what's the point of having two different architecture for P and E cores? Intel needs to copy what AMD is doing right now. A Zen core and a power optimized Zen. The complexity of their P-cores and E-cores isn't helping with their dwindling money.

Reply

[-]

Qesa@reddit

Right now skymont has better PPA than zen 5c, while lion cove has worse PPA than zen 5. Intel making their small core a denser lion cove is going to be an absolute losing strategy for them. If they were to unify it'd need to be by beefing up skymont.

Reply

[-]

Raikaru@reddit

Arrow Lake E Cores are extremely good though? If anything the problem with Arrow Lake are it's P cores

Reply

[-]

hackenclaw@reddit

the fact that Arrow lake simplify the scheduling problem by removing SMT. SMT never make any sense when E cores exist because SMT is still slower than E Cores. If you ask me Alder lake & Raptor lake having SMT is the failure. Intel should have disable them for i7 and below.

Reply

[-]

laffer1@reddit

Not as much as you think. Intel only has thread director on windows and Linux. Common uses of the two are quite different and sensible defaults are challenging. On other operating systems is mostly round robin and a process may get a p or e core. With hyper threading it was simpler to schedule (no e cores at all). Intel and amd need to put out more guidance on how to best schedule their chip designs. Even Microsoft struggled to get it right with 24h2 fixing amd problems that have been around for years and still missing the mark with the new chips.

Reply

[-]

VenditatioDelendaEst@reddit

Sensible default for desktop is simple: use the fastest CPU first. SMT has larger difference between fastest and slowest CPU, and a CPU can suddenly get way slower if its sibling is utilized. For inhomogenous workload like software compile, where concurrency varies and only some jobs are on the critical path, wrong thread getting scheduled on a CPU with an active sibling can slow whole thing down. Same can happen with no-SMT hybrid arch of course, but not as bad because the difference between fastest and slowest case is less.

Reply

[-]

laffer1@reddit

On 14th gen, a hyperthreaded p core and an e core are about the same when the whole cpu is utilized. E cores got faster with the new ultra 200 series which is why they ditched hyperthreading. The next problem is determining it’s a desktop to begin with. In a Unix or Linux environment, it could be a server, desktop, laptop, or embedded device. So now you need to have different rules for desktop and laptop parts and you have to identify them. That means extra code to add hints that the scheduler can read. If the laptop is plugged in, maybe you want p cores first. On battery the reverse.

Reply

[-]

996forever@reddit

> SMT never make any sense when E cores exist because SMT is still slower than E Cores. I don’t understand this sentiment when Turin Dense (192 core Zen 5c server) still deploys SMT with good results. Its performance is *way* higher than Intel 6780E. (Sierra forest 144 core E-core server)

Reply

[-]

theQuandary@reddit

192 big-core design beats 144 little-core design? That shouldn't surprise anyone. AMD's chip is also massively bigger. Given that Zen5 is 4.15mm2 and Zen5c is 3.09mm2, we can do a little math (128 * 4.15 / 3.09 = 171.91) and conclude that this Zen5c chip uses MORE silicon than a 128-core design using normal Zen5 cores. Intel's chip is so much smaller that they showed off a 288-core version back in February that will launch early next year. Interestingly, the math here (128 * 4.15 / 1.73 = 307.05) indicates that Intel's 288-core chip could use LESS silicon than a 128-core Zen5 design. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21276/intel-previews-sierra-forest-with-288-e-cores-announces-granite-rapids-d-for-2025-launch-at-mwc-2024

Reply

[-]

996forever@reddit

You're directly comparing area on different nodes?

Reply

[-]

theQuandary@reddit

What's your point? Even if we compare Redwood Cove at 5.05mm2 on Intel 4 (worse than TSMC N5) and we still get just a 18% difference in core size despite Zen4 being on a significantly more advanced node. You can look at the physical size of Intel's 288-core chip in that article and see that it's not bigger than EPYC (even the heat spreader is much smaller.

Reply

[-]

PMARC14@reddit

The Zen C cores are different being more similar to the full size cores vs. little cores and take up space

Reply

[-]

996forever@reddit

But Intel P and E performance is supposedly so similar, it suddenly…isn’t so similar when it’s not a favourable comparison to them? Turin Dense beats Clearwater Forest in performance by margins far greater than 192 vs 144 core, or 350w vs 400w TDP can account for.

Reply

[-]

PMARC14@reddit

I mean e cores are designed from the ground up and significantly more efficient in silicon design that may not have the components to hyperthread while the Zen C cores are relatively simple shrink of the larger Zen design, sure they perform well, but there are still not as efficient in die size to performance as the Intel offering. The P cores are the laggard and the ones that aren't advancing.

Reply

[-]

Geddagod@reddit

>But Intel P and E performance is supposedly so similar, it suddenly…isn’t so similar when it’s not a favourable comparison to them? I'm struggling to see where in the thread you are responding to it is mentioned that P and E core performance is similar from Intel. People have said E-core performance is greater than the performance gained by SMT, which is definitely true, but also doesn't account for the fact that adding SMT likely consumes way less additional power and area than adding a P-core. However you brining Turin Dense here is just baffling, there is no connection between Turin Dense and *your* argument of P and E cores performing similarly, or his argument of adding E-cores being better than adding SMT. It's almost as if you just wanted to talk about Turin Dense for no reason lol. Also yes, this generation (skymont vs lioncove) IPC is pretty similar, and the performance gap has shrunk drastically. That is not the case for what Sierra Forest uses, which is Crestmont. What does this have to do with a favorable comparison or whatever? >Turin Dense beats Clearwater Forest in performance by margins far greater than 192 vs 144 core, or 350w vs 400w TDP can account for. Turin Dense uses N3 vs CLF on Intel 3, has 33% more cores, a core that should have ballpark what, 40% higher IPC? If you point is that Turin Dense is getting much better performance because of SMT... I'm sure that helps lol, but the reality is that there's much larger reasons why Turin Dense has better performance.

Reply

[-]

Due_Recognition_2363@reddit

Sierra Forest, the intel 3 based crestmont server chip that has been released. Clearwater Forest is the rumored intel 18a darkmont server chip that has yet to be released.

Reply

[-]

996forever@reddit

You’re right, it’s Sierra Forest-SP that’s been released

Reply

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

on 192 cores i would expect SMT overhead to far exeed its benefits. If it does not you are having seriuos issue feeding cores.

Reply

[-]

Vb_33@reddit

It has more cores and even more threads. Makes sense it would win on paper.

Reply

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

SMT never made any sense on any CPU with more than 4 cores anyway.

Reply

[-]

Wander715@reddit (OP)

Still not as good as P cores or AMD Zen 4/5 cores though. Given a choice I think most buyers would rather just have more P cores packed on the die space vs all those E cores. Sure it's allowed them to do away with hyperthreading I agree there, but if Arrow Lake is any indication that hasn't done much to help with efficiency or overall appeal.

Reply

[-]

ResponsibleJudge3172@reddit

No, they are faster than Zen 4

Reply

[-]

MaksDampf@reddit

While your point is correct that for the workloads that an average user wants from his desktop, the additional E-Cores don't matter, the same can be said for more P-Cores. Any workload that scales beyond 8 P-Cores will take equally advantage of the available E-Cores, maybe more. Intel has 2 All-Pcore CPUs ready to launch into the Desktop, yet the didn't. Why do you think that is? \- They have an SPR / EMR EE LCC DIE with up to 20 P-Cores, 48Lanes of PCIe or even a MCC version with 32Cores and 60MB of cache. Full support for dual rate AVX512 too - They didn't launch it for the Desktop. \- They had a Bartlett Lake CPU Die in the making based on Raptorlake refresh but with 12P-Cores 0 E-Cores. Should have been of similar Die size to Raptorlake. Yet they didn't mass produce it. Why is that so do you think? = Because it does not make a difference for Client workloads! \- In games the EE LCC 20Core or MCC 32Core CPU would perform much worse than the 14900K because it is a Mesh topology with high DRAM latencies and the Cores itself need to clock much lower to kepp the TDP in check and be able to offer the fullrate AVX512 without throttling. If Intel launched this with Desktop Threadripper this would still be uneconomic for them becaue its a huge Die. \- Bartlett Lake in the best case offers just the same gaming performance than 14900k as games just don't scale with more cores. It would throw the power efficiency out of the window and have significantly worse multithreaded performance though. - Not really worth it to validate a new CPU platform for. Plus it is missing the IGP and AI accelerator that OEMs want. \- 4x extra P-Cores have exactly the same number of Ringbus Stops as 16x extra E-Cores. So the Latency would only improve if you cut off the Ringbus after 8 Cores and not add any extra Cores.

Reply

[-]

soggybiscuit93@reddit

How would more P cores help? What would all P core frequency be when all 12 P cores would be fully loaded? Do you think 12 P cores would compete as closely with AMD's 16 core models as the current 8+16 does?

Reply

[-]

Raikaru@reddit

You say not as good as the p cores but from what i’ve seen you can overclock them and get similar performance to the p cores with lower power draw so i’m not sure what exactly you’re talking about here

Reply

[-]

Qesa@reddit

If we're boiling arrow lake down to a single "the problem", it's the memory controller/inter-chiplet latency. But the E cores definitely show more promise than P, similar IPC and like 20% lower clocks at a third the size

Reply

[-]

octagonaldrop6@reddit

The architecture has vastly improved power efficiency and pretty well obsoletes hyper-threading. My N100 CPU with only E-cores is ridiculously good for my low power server. Not everything is about gaming.

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

Frankly, an N100 would be probably good enough for a simple web only desktop.

Reply

[-]

RedTuesdayMusic@reddit

Single channel memory is a next level kind of dealbreaker

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

And how does that matter to my mom browsing Facebook?

Reply

[-]

996forever@reddit

A Mac mini is probably snappier for a web browser machine.

Reply

[-]

BloodyLlama@reddit

And costs 4x as much. You get what you pay for.

Reply

[-]

NeonBellyGlowngVomit@reddit

You'd be better off getting a nuc for under $150 and slapping ChromeOSFlex on it than you would getting any Mac machine if all Mum wants to do is Facebook.

Reply

[-]

996forever@reddit

OS snappiness and browser performance (including YouTube video streamed playback) still matters to someone who only uses a browser.

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

And yet, nobody except Phoronix tests browser performance in CPU reviews.

Reply

[-]

VenditatioDelendaEst@reddit

TPU does. And browser performance is way more user-impacting than games that run at 200+ FPS.

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

Oh, nice.

Reply

[-]

NeonBellyGlowngVomit@reddit

Honey, you wouldn't know the difference between an Atom Core and an Apple Core if it was a giant dick that slapped you in the face.

Reply

[-]

TrptJim@reddit

The Mac Mini is one of, if not *the*, best deals on a desktop machine today. The performance, efficiency, form-factor, pretty much everything about it is head and shoulders above anything at its price point. I'd go as far as to say may even be quite overkill for the mom, but she could probably use it for a decade with no problems.

Reply

[-]

g1aiz@reddit

That is one thing that people often ignore is that Macs last a very long time and even after 5-10 years they don't feel as old as their Windows counterparts would.

Reply

[-]

MumrikDK@reddit

> and even after 5-10 years they don't feel as old as their Windows counterparts would. This is archaic logic. Your launch time Windows 10 PC doesn't feel less snappy now than it did then unless you're literally trying to run heavy weight software from a significantly newer era, but that is true for all platforms.

Reply

[-]

total_cynic@reddit

Spectre and Meltdown mitigations might disagree with you on the >doesn't feel less snappy front.

Reply

[-]

Dey_EatDaPooPoo@reddit

A base model Mac mini costs $600 and has an M4 10-core CPU and GPU. It's also not super stripped down having 16GB of RAM. To my knowledge there's not any new small form factor computer you can buy under $1000 that can come close to matching its CPU and GPU performance, and there's not really any other computer out there that can match its power efficiency at any price. The I/O is decent with 4 high-speed USB-C ports too. Storage capacity and video game compatibility notwithstanding, it's probably the best value for money computer out on the market right now and considering this is Apple we're talking about that's saying a lot. The upgrades are insanely overpriced and not worth it at all for the overwhelming majority of use cases so getting anything other than the base spec is ill-advised though.

Reply

[-]

formervoater2@reddit

Single channel makes so much less of a difference on DDR5 because of the subchannels and extra bank groups. For the sort of applications an N100 finds itself in the single channel is more than good enough.

Reply

[-]

Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

Its fine for how its intended to be used. r/hardware struggles to understand non gaming hardware. Can you give an example of a simple desktop task that Single channel memory would cause it to struggle with? Honestly if you are buying it to play games you bought the wrong product.

Reply

[-]

MaksDampf@reddit

For most CPU workloads not really. 40gb/s shared by 4 Cores is actually better than what a all P-Core 11900K had per Core. For the IGP Singlechannel is really bad, though.

Reply

[-]

ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit

40GB/s? I feel like almost all N100 computers are using standard DDR4-3200 which is closer to 25.6GB/s.

Reply

[-]

Ray-chan81194@reddit

also with DDR5-4800.

Reply

[-]

ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit

I feel like the overwhelming majority of ADL-N systems are sold with DDR4 because lets face it, these are super budget machines, so DDR5 simply does not enter the picture.

Reply

[-]

MumrikDK@reddit

The 4xRJ45/6xSATA boards on Aliexpress seem to like a DDR5 SODIMM.

Reply

[-]

Ray-chan81194@reddit

Yeah, on the budget machine sure. But I do have seen a DDR5 (actually LPDDR5) machine out there too. So just wanna point out that there's also some machine with DDR5/LPDDR5.

Reply

[-]

TwelveSilverSwords@reddit

The iGPU is smaller so it doesn't matter

Reply

[-]

VenditatioDelendaEst@reddit

One would think. But then... *webdevs*.

Reply

[-]

Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

Thats exactly what its used for, there are tons of tiny desktops and cheap laptops that use it.

Reply

[-]

YNWA_1213@reddit

An N200 update with the new e-cores + Xe graphics is highly desirable to me. Would be an interesting pipe cleaner chip for Intel to ship.

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

At work we're using an older Celeron J6412, and while I didn't expect it to struggle, I'm genuinely surprised at how well it handles displaying heavy websites

Reply

[-]

YNWA_1213@reddit

Yeah, there’s a few caveats to N100 as to why I haven’t jumped on the train yet, but an update to a few clear areas could potentially replace my desktop outside of heavy gaming workloads.

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

Gaming and software development are 90% of my desktop usage. I shudder to think how long a Civ6 turn would take on an N100...

Reply

[-]

toddestan@reddit

Given the benchmarks I've seen, I can't imagine it would be much worse than the i7-3770K I played Civ6 on. It could potentially even be slightly faster. Probably the thing that would hurt the N100 most would be the platform. How would the N100's low-end single channel DDR4 memory compare to a high-end (in 2012) DDR3 kit?

Reply

[-]

total_cynic@reddit

You can get N100s with DDR5, which AIUI gives you dual channel with a single module. I've a FireBat T8 with this arrangement and 16GB and it is very pleasant to use.

Reply

[-]

WhyIsSocialMedia@reddit

Do you run Civ 6 on an SSD? It's just back with Civ 5 it benefited massively from an SSD over a HDD. I don't game anymore so I don't know if HDDs are even common anymore.

Reply

[-]

toddestan@reddit

I'm running with a SATA SSD, as that system is too old to support a NVMe drive. A SATA SSD is definitely much faster than a hard drive in any case. I would imagine most gamers now are using a SSD of some sort, though the Civ games are old enough that there may be more casual gamers running them on older computers that still have HDDs.

Reply

[-]

WhyIsSocialMedia@reddit

If they carried on using a similar architecture (especially if they scaled up the previous one) it's possible it will continue to benefit from an NVMe instead. I remember I did a long game with 63 civs (the limit, yes it needed mods as there aren't that many in the base game), a map of the world that's at the limit of what's possible in size, and longest game time (also obviously all civs in their real life locations!). It was taking like 15 minutes a turn or something stupid in the late game, and that dropped to something crazy like 30 seconds. In case you're wondering one of the native American Civs was the hardest to beat, because there were very few other Civs near them, the immense geographical advantage of the Americas (especially as they settled in I think the mid-West, so were surrounded by mountains - I was the British Empire, so my best advantage (my navy) quickly became useless against them), and the immense resources located there. Australia also had geographic advantages, but the lack of resources/habitability made them almost useless on the world stage. All in all I was surprised at how well each Civ represented the real life equivalent of that location (the modern US Civ would have likely been the same as the natives if they didn't start on the East coast and have trouble expanding due to the mountain advantages - main difference between real life and the game was that in real life the natives did not start out on equal technological footing, if they had I'm sure they'd have absolutely obliterated the Europeans).

Reply

[-]

WhyIsSocialMedia@reddit

In my experience with Civ 5, it would massively benefit from running on an SSD instead of a HDD. You probably have it on an SSD already though I imagine? Not sure if SSD performance makes a difference, or if the speed up hit a different bottleneck after switching.

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

There isn't a single HDD in the entire house. Frankly, I believe HDDs in user computers should just die already.

Reply

[-]

octagonaldrop6@reddit

E-cores are now equivalent to Skylake P-cores. Which happened to be the best selling CPUs the year that Civ6 came out. So I wouldn’t shudder too hard, the turn time would be about what the developers intended. Assuming you have the same number of E-cores as you had cores back then.

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

Haven't really checked how heavily multithreaded it is, to be honest. Depending on how the AI is implemented (because that's what takes time) it's probably either very MT or not at all, I doubt it's somewhere in between.

Reply

[-]

Noreng@reddit

Skymont is quite a bit ahead of Skylake. It's faster than Tiger Lake.

Reply

[-]

octagonaldrop6@reddit

Right. I forgot they had a new generation of E-cores now. That was referring to the old ones. Proves the point even more!

Reply

[-]

BambaiyyaLadki@reddit

There's a slight refresh on the way (N100 to N150, N305 to N355, etc.) but it only bumps the clock speed on the CPU and the GPU iirc.

Reply

[-]

inevitabledeath3@reddit

Pipe cleaner?

Reply

[-]

spazturtle@reddit

First product made on a new node.

Reply

[-]

Vb_33@reddit

As in AMD would clean Intels pipe.

Reply

[-]

martsand@reddit

Heck I had a laptop with an i5 1335u with 2 pcores and 8ecores with xe graphics, loved it - it stayed cool, gamed ok for what it was (diablo 4 at 30fps woot haha) it was a nice chip

Reply

[-]

ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit

I don't think so. My old i5-6500 was struggling with simple modern desktop and light multi-threading when I replaced it and an N100 in comparison is a fraction of its performance. Modern bloat is real.

Reply

[-]

NeonBellyGlowngVomit@reddit

To be fair, Skylake CPUs are utter dogshite. The real issue you ran into likely wasn't bloat, but the Spectre and Meltdown mitigation patches, of which Skylake was hit hardest by.

Reply

[-]

ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit

Alder Lake-N has Skylake level IPC which a lot of people have conflated with "performs the same as Skylake." Absolute performance however is not the same. A 4C/4T i5-6500 has a 3.2Ghz base clock @ 65W compared to a 4C/4T N100 which doesn't even have a base clock listed on Ark. My research tells me the base clock is 800Mhz at the default 6W TDP. If Skylake is dogshite then Alder Lake N is much worse than that. Secondly, I never patched anything so it wasn't that.

Reply

[-]

NeonBellyGlowngVomit@reddit

You got patches anytime you updated your OS. Both Linux and Windows. So if you never patched anything, that means you never updated your OS. Ever.

Reply

[-]

ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit

> So if you never patched anything, that means you never updated your OS. Ever. Is there an echo in here?

Reply

[-]

NeonBellyGlowngVomit@reddit

Right. Alright then, nice chatting with ya, dumbass.

Reply

[-]

cc_network@reddit

I use an AsRock N100M motherboard with a silent GT1030 GPU as my desktop. 1080p gaming is \~100FPS on older titles, snappy enough to run a lot of tabs, Teams and Outlook when I need to, and completely silent!

Reply

[-]

sweet-459@reddit

those N200 e cores are prettym much equivalent to Ryzen 5 5600x's cores. So pretty much the perform like 11th gen i7' cores

Reply

[-]

NeonBellyGlowngVomit@reddit

> those N200 e cores are prettym much equivalent to Ryzen 5 5600x's cores. Not even close. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5178vs3859/Intel-N200-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-5600X

Reply

[-]

sweet-459@reddit

saw some tests where on multi core they perform similiarly to the 5600x cant recall it tho

Reply

[-]

NeonBellyGlowngVomit@reddit

Gonna have to do better than that, mate.

Reply

[-]

sweet-459@reddit

Oh shit it was the 3600 not the 5600, im stupid.

Reply

[-]

GlumBuilding5706@reddit

Broski the n200 is slower than an i5 4570 in ipc, multi core and single core performance, don't kid yourself

Reply

[-]

NeonBellyGlowngVomit@reddit

Doubtful. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5178vs3029vs3481/Intel-N200-vs-AMD-Ryzen-3-1200-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-3600

Reply

[-]

ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit

Too many people responding in this thread are mistaking IPC for performance.

Reply

[-]

GlumBuilding5706@reddit

From what i know they perform more like a 4th generation (haswell i5) quad core chip

Reply

[-]

zsaleeba@reddit

The argument about power efficiency might be more compelling if the transition to e-cores had corresponded with improved power efficiency, but instead, power efficiency was quite bad in the first generations with e-cores. Maybe in the long term it's helping out, but there's no obvious correlation there.

Reply

[-]

ResponsibleJudge3172@reddit

Arrowlake had huge efficiency improvements over Rocketlake in all scenarios

Reply

[-]

total_cynic@reddit

A flamethrower has huge efficiency improvements over Rocketlake in all scenarios. It was a notoriously inefficient backport to 14nm.

Reply

[-]

octagonaldrop6@reddit

You’re referring to power efficiency under load. When idling or doing mundane tasks the P-cores can be completely parked. That’s where you get insane power efficiency. Useful for laptop battery life when doing simple tasks.

Reply

[-]

MaksDampf@reddit

Efficiency is defined as the ratio between useful output and input. There is no efficiency found when doing nothing.

Reply

[-]

FlatTableGoose@reddit

Your definition is arbitrary. My server sits idle 99% of the time. My 5900x idles at 80w (and that's with me forcing it to Eco mode). My 165H idles at 9w and my HX370 at 8. The latter two are far more efficient, regarless of their draw when under load/your semantics.

Reply

[-]

996forever@reddit

If your use case is not using it, a Mac’s idle drain obliterated anything x86 can spit out.

Reply

[-]

psydroid@reddit

An Orange Pi Win Plus from 2017 is my 24/7 machine due to its extremely low power consumption under load. I'm thinking of replacing it with an Orange Pi 4A (or 5 Max/Plus) in the short term while looking at Qualcomm/Mediatek/Nvidia options in the longer term. x86 is for heavier or specific workloads and turned on as needed. But I find I don't need it that often anymore, as ARM hardware becomes more powerful.

Reply

[-]

996forever@reddit

yes, what I mentioned is indeed, an ARM device and not an x86 one

Reply

[-]

skycake10@reddit

This is unironically part of the reason I just got a Mac mini. I have a Windows gaming desktop that uses 100-150W at moderate idle (web browsing or watching YouTube videos), and I don't really play video games anymore. I've started using a Mac mini that uses about 7W average for the same use case with a subjectively better experience.

Reply

[-]

FabianN@reddit

Efficiency in this situation is contextualized by the scenario; computers sitting idle, doing no work. If you're doing nothing you would expect the energy used would be zero. But that's not the case, the computer does nothing but still uses energy. That *is* a matter of efficiency.

Reply

[-]

windowpuncher@reddit

I agree with you, but if the computer is doing "nothing" it's doing a LOT of stuff in the background pretty much constantly. Super tiny things, but it's always something. If you're stuck without E cores, it's just more power doing "nothing".

Reply

[-]

Noreng@reddit

Lunar Lake on the other hand

Reply

[-]

Captain-Griffen@reddit

Very little at Intel is about games. This helps laptops and servers. Guess where Intel makes their money?

Reply

[-]

PappyPete@reddit

This is the correct take. People (read: gamers) got their panties in a bunch when Zen 5(%) showed little gains for gaming, but AMD was trying to increase in the datacenter space... which makes them more money.

Reply

[-]

WhyIsSocialMedia@reddit

To be fair the launch was a complete mess. AMD does value gamers quite a bit though given the X3D line of course. But that creates less motivation to fix the mess immediately when people are waiting for X3D.

Reply

[-]

DerpSenpai@reddit

The X3D line is also for servers, they just send some leftovers for "gaming"

Reply

[-]

Numerlor@reddit

Yeah but they value them because the cost of reusing a chipper they make anyway is minimal bit because they're the focus

Reply

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

I think a bigger issue was that Zen 5 results were different than the marketing which was caused by the windows sheduler update not being released and stupid things like different performance in admin mode.

Reply

[-]

f3n2x@reddit

No, those things apply to Zen 4 and 5 almost equally. The launch was a mess because the wide Zen 5 architecture is starving in games without the vcache.

Reply

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

even if they apply to Zen 4, it was still false advertisement based on sheduler that was not released and it was doubly false advertisement based on difference from zen 4, which is still much bellow advertised because zen4 got the improvement too.

Reply

[-]

imaginary_num6er@reddit

Yeah but Intel is a gaming company with all those Intel Alchemists trucks driving around the country with internet cafes inside

Reply

[-]

UsernameAvaylable@reddit

> Very little at Intel is about games. This helps laptops and servers. Then why the hell did they release half a decade of chips that boost to 150-250W out of the box? For Word and Excel?

Reply

[-]

sdk5P4RK4@reddit

i mean, they wanted to sell some didnt they? no other way they could do it than raise the wattage that high

Reply

[-]

Captain-Griffen@reddit

Because leaving easy money on the table is pointless, but they won't design their CPU architecture around gamers.

Reply

[-]

benjiro3000@reddit

> My N100 CPU with only E-cores is ridiculously good for my low power server. As dedicated NAS/MiniPC they are good because of the price / performance. But when you can buy a 5825U for ~200$, that also idles at 7W (5W with powertop enabled), vs a 4W N100 (same powertop).... Under loads, they really are not that extra efficient. I have run workloads on both, the n100 was hitting 18W, the 5825u was hitting 45W (35W profile), but the 5825u was more then twice as fast. Measured from the wall. Non of this "reported" bullshit. Note: performance per watt!! In reality it was 5x faster but if we calculate down to watt, its was about twice. Here is a example of one (because i know people are going to ask, what is a 5825u): https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen-7-5825u-mini-pc-nucbox-m5-plus?spm=..index.header_1.1&variant=2602e62a-16e2-4a86-937c-36f93dbb1356 https://aoostar.com/collections/amd-pc/products/aoostar-r7-2-bay-40t-nas-storage-amd-ryzen-7-5825u-mini-pc8c-16t-up-to-4-5ghz-with-w11-pro-ddr4-ram-2-m-2-nvme-%E5%A4%8D%E5%88%B6?variant=49012947910954 ... Often the price is about 50 a 100 bucks different (aka 50% higher). But OP is talking in context of a mixed core loadout. In Mixed core loadouts, i found those e-cores more a issue. A 13600k was doing most tasks on the performance tasks, on the performance cores, where as it only shine with e-cores was benchmarks. Aka, loads that really pushed all cores (and there the P cores destroyed the power efficiency under 100% load). The idea is great, but because software has no way of specific targeting the core layouts (unlike with Apples M series + MacOS), you tend to feel that those e-cores are kind of wasted silica. These days i am rocking a 7945HX (16x Zen4 cores ... Minisforum BD790i) and even there you see that split complexes (dual chiplets), create a disadvantages as loads tend to go on one core, unless you can REALLY push all cores (like compile jobs). But i feel that micro stutters are a non-issues with AMD because your not putting side-loads on totally different complex's (where esp the cache differences really HURT with gaming on Intel e-cores). In a ideal worlds, P-E Cores are a great idea. In practices, with the inability of us programmers to really target a more "unified" architecture. Like, set task X on LowPerformance, Y on Mid, Z on High, where this abstraction layer handles it for the OS (like MacOS does). So yea, for minipc and nas, those n100's are extreme great but for desktop, its really a mixed bag.

Reply

[-]

manafount@reddit

Definitely agree with your main points. While there has been a lot of noise made about improvements in scheduling on Windows 11 over Windows 10 (mostly around taking cues from [Intel Thread Director](https://www.anandtech.com/show/16959/intel-innovation-alder-lake-november-4th/3) and having a more holistic view of power/efficiency of each core within the current power envelopes), it still seems like we have a ways to go before operating systems handle heterogenous ("mixed") CPU architectures well across the board. I absolutely love the E-core only designs, though. While they may not achieve the best perf/watt efficiency in all cases (especially demanding workloads), they're very _space_ and _cost_ efficient on a die. Being able to pick up capable quad-core x86 CPUs for use in low-power embedded applications for less than a Raspberry Pi 5 in some cases still feels like a dream. Plus, many of them can be passively cooled quite easily which makes them very flexible platforms to work with.

Reply

[-]

benjiro3000@reddit

> they're very space and cost efficient on a die. Check out AMD their Zen4c cores, while not as space efficient as E Cores, when you start looking at performance/watt, they actually are way better at that level. > Being able to pick up capable quad-core x86 CPUs for use in low-power embedded applications for less than a Raspberry Pi 5 in some cases still feels like a dream. Its more of a statement how expensive the Pi's have gotten, then really X86 getting cheaper... You where able to pick up x86 powered devices with those old atoms or pentiums for the same price ranges as now. But compared to the prices of Pi's, they crapped on x86. Now with the non-stop price increase and the whole focus on selling to big customers, we have a world where Pi's are simply not as competitive anymore. Look up the orange pi, and a few other brands, they tend to have a better price point but they also increased their prices over time (if the market goes up, companies follow for more profit/margines).

Reply

[-]

manafount@reddit

Trust me, I’m well aware of all of the Pi clones 😂 I own probably a dozen Amlogic and Rockchip-based boards. In a few niches they’re an absolute steal, but in many others the mainline Linux support ranges from terrible to nonexistent. I’m sure the Armbian community will benefit as a side effect from the increased focus on Windows-on-ARM lately (as well as the Nvidia/Mediatek partnership), but in the meantime I’d rather save myself the headache for personal projects and use an RPi or n100.

Reply

[-]

AngryElPresidente@reddit

You could, in theory, use cgroups cpuset to manually lasso the P and E cores. But I think the last I checked a few years ago, and in a Qemu/KVM context before thread director got upstreamed, in practice, it hasn't yielded much benefit compute-wise compared to just letting the Linux kernel handle it.

Reply

[-]

nanonan@reddit

Your N100 would be even better with HT. They aren't targeting power efficiency with their design, that's just a happy byproduct of anemic clocks.

Reply

[-]

ExtendedDeadline@reddit

> Not everything is about gaming How dare you sir But, yes, I completely agree. E-cores are super nifty.

Reply

[-]

NightFuryToni@reddit

Same here, an N305 is powering my entire network and a few servers via Proxmox, the GPU works great with transcoding. If only it had more PCI-E lanes, but knowing Intel they will brand that Xeon and charge a fortune for it.

Reply

[-]

the_hat_madder@reddit

>Not everything is about gaming. Say it louder for the dullards in the back.

Reply

[-]

Wander715@reddit (OP)

>My N100 CPU with only E-cores is ridiculously good for my low power server. Sure but if anything you're proving my point. This is a pretty niche user case that doesn't apply to the majority of desktop consumers. My main point is that E cores have been largely useless to the majority of users buying desktops with Intel CPUs inside and tend to cause more problems than they solve.

Reply

[-]

FabianN@reddit

The biggest market in computing is not consumer desktop computing. Not by a long shot. And gaming is not the biggest segment even within consumer desktop computing. *Your* use case is the more niche situation, not the other way around as you think.

Reply

[-]

Wander715@reddit (OP)

>The biggest market in computing is not consumer desktop computing. Not by a long shot. Sure but desktop line is the focus of my post, it's in the title. I agree for server/workstation E cores make sense and have a lot of application. I think they've been a failure in the desktop lineup and bring nothing useful to the table for most consumers in that market.

Reply

[-]

FabianN@reddit

The development of the chips are all intertwined; server, laptop, and desktop. They are not designed entirely individually but more as a single base that is then adjusted and modified for the specific purpose. You can not talk about the design decisions made for desktop cpus and ignore mobile or server because these kinds of decisions are the kinds that are made for the base design of the chips that then become all of those different market segments.

Reply

[-]

SteakandChickenMan@reddit

I like that you ignore the next sentence. That was fun.

Reply

[-]

Wander715@reddit (OP)

Their next sentence is only halfway true and not really worth responding to. Sure it's improved MT but not in a meaningful way. Packing more P cores on the die will increase MT as well but not quite as much. To your average consumer the increase in MT is pretty irrelevant. In terms of efficiency, are you really going to argue E cores have made Intel efficient when 13th and 14th gen exist?

Reply

[-]

soggybiscuit93@reddit

Putting more P cores on the die would've resulted in *less* nT performance, given the same die space. E cores at this point have vastly better PPA than P cores. 13th and 14th gen are inefficient because they're default power limits exceed the peak efficiency curve. This was done as to not lose on performance: RPL would not have been pushed nearly as hard out of the box if X3D didn't exist. You're understanding of efficiency needs to expand: Intel is limited in their current design to 12 cores on consumer. 12P would lose in nT to 8+16 at the same power consumption.

Reply

[-]

octagonaldrop6@reddit

Yes. They are efficient because when idling the P-cores can be completely parked. Under full load those CPUs aren’t power efficient, but a laptop can squeeze more battery life because you can switch to E-cores for simple tasks. It’s not all about gaming.

Reply

[-]

Wander715@reddit (OP)

Battery life? I'm literally talking about desktop systems, it's in my title. You're focusing on things like laptops and servers, in which case yes I agree E cores definitely make sense.

Reply

[-]

octagonaldrop6@reddit

Then you must understand why E-cores make sense. They aren’t going to have a different architecture for desktops to optimize for gaming when all other use cases benefit from E-cores. One day games will better take advantage of MT and we will be able to reap the benefits. Putting a thread on an E-core is now better than even hyper-threading.

Reply

[-]

floydhwung@reddit

Those E-cores are extremely good at what they are designed for. Look at the ADL-N chips, they are cheaper than Pi, not using much more power but vastly more powerful. I think Intel should take the E-Cores and glue 32 of them together, plus dual channel RAM and ECC, it’s gonna make a killing the entry level server market.

Reply

[-]

Wander715@reddit (OP)

For servers I agree there's a great application there. Again my post is focusing on their presence in the desktop lineup which I think is mostly useless. I think Intel would be having more success in the desktop market right now if they had maybe 1-2 CPUs with E cores for people that actually have use for them with the additional MT performance, and then the rest of the line is P core only chips focusing on ST performance for stuff like gaming.

Reply

[-]

Lycanthoss@reddit

How do you imagine adding P cores instead of E cores will help gaming? Games don't scale past 8 cores. Heck, most games barely even scale past 6 cores. Also, games usually drop FPS if you disable the E cores. Some games benefit from E cores off, but most don't care or benefit from the E cores.\\ No P core only designs aren't gonna give them the gaming crown and I'm so tired of hearing about it. They will not improve performance to any significant degree if at all. Intel needs some fundamental changes to beat X3D CPUs.

Reply

[-]

RBTropical@reddit

Almost all games on the market scale past 6 cores - 6 has been a bottleneck for some time. This is because the consoles are Ryzen 8 core chips.

Reply

[-]

Tonybishnoi@reddit

Less than 7 cores are accessible by the games on PlayStation 5

Reply

[-]

VenditatioDelendaEst@reddit

The PS5 has SMT. So a game that used all the concurrency available to it on console (but had a hard cap on thread count; bizzarre software design), would scale to 12 or 13 cores on PC.

Reply

[-]

RBTropical@reddit

Its “6.5” accessible to devs - still higher than 6, meaning 6 cores is a bottleneck. Games are also made for the Xbox, which afaik has access to all 8. In either scenario, they’re coded to use more than 6.

Reply

[-]

WhyIsSocialMedia@reddit

> Games don't scale past 8 cores. H Because most gamers don't have more than 8 cores. There's still a ton of room for parallelization in games, as so much in them can be done in parallel. There are examples of games which do scale well beyond that. But of course this isn't an argument that helps OP. If the games scale well then there's a good chance they'd also benefit from E cores even more.

Reply

[-]

Lycanthoss@reddit

That's not why games don't scale. Games (and most workloads) don't scale with cores very well because games are just not a great workload for many cores. The best workloads for multiple cores are where you prepare a ton of data, split it into independent parts and then work on it. Games are not that. In games, if you tried to do that, one thread would start working on a piece of data and suddenly realize that another thread is working on something it needs, so the original thread would lock itself until the second thread completes and waste time. If you managed to lock few enough times you could gain performance, but it might be very little. If you lock too many times you will lose performance. And because game objects frequently depend on a lot of other game objects, you just won't be able to parallelize efficiently. Maybe if somebody found a way to completely abstract how games work instead of the currently popular EC or ECS frameworks, then maybe we could see better core scaling. But that would require us to completely rethink how game engines work and it's not even a guarantee there is a solution. So no, as things stand, lack of cores is not the reason games don't scale. We have had quad core CPUs for almost 2 decades. If a game performs poorly, it is because the game developers didn't optimize properly because they didn't spend enough time on it.

Reply

[-]

Plebius-Maximus@reddit

>Because most gamers don't have more than 8 cores. There's still a ton of room for parallelization in games, as so much in them can be done in parallel. There are examples of games which do scale well beyond that. I'm not sure why you're downvoted, you're correct. For the people who don't seem to get this - In a few console generations when 16 core chips are standard on consoles, you better believe games will be utilising more than 8 cores. Issue is currently more than 8 is uncommon, both major consoles have 8, most CPU's that the average consumer buys have 8 or fewer. So when you need a 12/16 core chip to get best performance in a game, people will just get mad and call it unoptimised, so Devs won't do it until that many cores is standard.

Reply

[-]

democracywon2024@reddit

Actually... If you used the space the E cores take up to add cache... Then yes that would help.

Reply

[-]

gezafisch@reddit

The majority of desktop users don't game.

Reply

[-]

EternalFlame117343@reddit

You can turn a desktop Into a server. Therefore, e-cores are good in desktop

Reply

[-]

Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

Intel will see it as competing with their other products and kill or neuter it like they did with Atom. Stuff like this can't happen until Intel loses most of its market share or is split up.

Reply

[-]

s00mika@reddit

Atom never died though. Intel just stopped using the branding on consumer hardware because people associated it with low end crap, and marketed the newer atom chips as "Pentium" and "Celeron" instead.

Reply

[-]

dannybates@reddit

No, not when loads of server software licences charge per cpu core.

Reply

[-]

WhyIsSocialMedia@reddit

Stop using such software? Even if you can't, you realise other people exist? Saying no because it's not helpful to you species is really selfish. I really hate such contracts. Stop using and supporting the software. Appeasement will just lead to them doubling down on such models. Models which can hold back actual hardware development if they're common enough. All e-core high core count would have many uses in the server space. There's so many problems that scale better with core count Vs a more powerful single core and switching. If you have a ton of threads that don't sit around waiting a lot of the time (e.g. waiting on hardware or even memory (though memory is less of an issue with monstrous caches)), then they can easily scale better on many small cores instead of fewer large cores. Not to mention decreased price and increased efficiency. Even for ones that might scale better with fewer large cores, they could still potentially have much better price per performance or energy use per performance. That works because P cores often seem to have roughly double the performance, but require roughly four times the die area. So if it's very parallel it's easy to see why it's much more efficient (seemingly magic transistor scaling is possible because quadrupling the number of transistors in the same area generally does not quadruple the power consumption - that is to say power consumption is based on active die area (all things equal) rather than transistor count). And price can scale even better. If a P core takes up quadruple the area, then if you have a serious error in that area it's more costly. But if you have a similar error in ~4 E cores you can likely just disable one core. This gets even better again when you start splitting it into multiple dies, since obviously that scales better again due to being able to split up a block of four E cores into a single core with three deactivated (1-3), 2-2, 3-1, 4-0 - and you can mix and match them in different ways. But an equivalent amount of P core area only has one solution, either broken or working.

Reply

[-]

Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

You know its not this redditors opinion that's stopping Intel from doing making this product right?

Reply

[-]

WhyIsSocialMedia@reddit

Duh. Are you stupid?

Reply

[-]

Shoddy-Ad-7769@reddit

To be fair, it wasn't that bad of a model for a long time, before these different sized cores became a thang. Obviously the solution is to simply have a cost per type of core. $0.10 per P core. $0.04 per E core. And boom, not that big of a deal.

Reply

[-]

InstructionMoney4965@reddit

I used to use software that charged an additional license every time you doubled the core count. So we'd just wait until the project deadline and beg our AE for a pile of short term licenses and spin up a massive AWS instance to use them all

Reply

[-]

hmmm_42@reddit

Some does, but not even a majority.

Reply

[-]

Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

Can you list some paid for software that doesn't charge per core?

Reply

[-]

JaggedMetalOs@reddit

AMD and Ampere's high core count CPUs suggest this isn't a problem for their customers.

Reply

[-]

lightmatter501@reddit

If you can’t find vendors who charge by socket or make use of open source, then buy pcores. Many places would love a 32/64 ecore server because they care about perf per watt more than perf per core.

Reply

[-]

froop@reddit

There's definitely a growing, underserved market for low power prosumer server chips. The N series alder lake chips are really popular for small servers, but are hamstrung by limited i/o and lack of ecc support. Low end Enterprise cpus are way too expensive and don't have igpus. E cores + ecc + igpu and enough pcie lanes would be killer for nas and small servers.

Reply

[-]

auradragon1@reddit

>I think Intel should take the E-Cores and glue 32 of them together, plus dual channel RAM and ECC, it’s gonna make a killing the entry level server market. How would it compare to low tier Epyc and Ampere chips?

Reply

[-]

theQuandary@reddit

Skymont is 1.7mm2 and Zen5 is 4.2mm2 (Zen5c is 3.1mm2). Intel could put almost 20 Skymont cores in the space of 8 Zen5 cores. Even increasing cache and adding lots of space for larger busses could double the core count from 128 to 256 for the same amount of silicon. If that weren't necessary, then you'd be looking at north of 300 cores per CPU in the same total area.

Reply

[-]

auradragon1@reddit

What is the perf/watt, perf/area efficiency?

Reply

[-]

theQuandary@reddit

https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-6700e-ampere-altra Perf/watt is generally pretty close to Altra while absolute performance varies from midrange to best of the best. Anandtech has an image of the 288-core CPU delidded at a press conference. To my eyes, it looks pretty small compared to EPYC when you consider the number of cores. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21276/intel-previews-sierra-forest-with-288-e-cores-announces-granite-rapids-d-for-2025-launch-at-mwc-2024

Reply

[-]

floydhwung@reddit

It depends on the application. Say if I run Windows Servers, then Ampere has no place in my rack. The 32-core is just an arbitrary number. It may well be 16, 24, heck, even 64. The possibility of such high core count yet low cost (compared to Zen 4c) cores should prove attractive if Intel prices it right. For entry level servers they don’t need 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0, nor quad channel memory. These reductions in functionality ought to cost less to make.

Reply

[-]

auradragon1@reddit

At the end of the day, for servers, it's about area efficiency of cores, perf/watt, and cost. What makes you think Intel's e cores have an advantage over Ampere, Graviton, and AMD? I'd like to see hard numbers.

Reply

[-]

cp5184@reddit

They're very power inefficient, they use a lot of power and create a lot of heat. They're small and cheap as in small size, everything else about them is terrible. Nobody wants them because you can get better alternatives from basically anyone else.

Reply

[-]

JaggedMetalOs@reddit

> I think Intel should take the E-Cores and glue 32 of them together, plus dual channel RAM and ECC, it’s gonna make a killing the entry level server market. Is it still an "e-core" if it's the only core type on the CPU? :) The idea reminds me of when Intel ditched NetBurst (Pentium 4) and went back to the efficient P6 core design they had relegated to Pentium M laptop CPUs.

Reply

[-]

ThankGodImBipolar@reddit

Allegedly there was an 8+32 Arrow Lake SKU that was canceled

Reply

[-]

Hooray_Darakian@reddit

A xeon D update in that mold would be pretty awesome. I know you said entry level, but intel does have the sierra forest chips which scale from 144 down to 64 cores. I doubt they hit a price point compatible with "entry level", but its at least work happening in that direction.

Reply

[-]

Ratiofarming@reddit

Are we talking about the same E-cores? Because they're carrying hard in multithread workloads. Don't use Raptor Lake to judge them too much. If anything is problematic it's their P-cores that aren't faster than what AMD has.

Reply

[-]

Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

He said "for most consumers" and most consumers do not do "multithread workloads" they do email, a web browser and word documents. Read everything people write not just the bits you disagree with.

Reply

[-]

Ratiofarming@reddit

And on which cores do the browser instances, email client and office suite reside for the majority of time? Because that would be the architecture where development would be most relevant, wouldn't it? Especially if a stronger E-core means longer battery life, less heat etc. during every day operation because things that used to require being moved to a P-core can stay on E-core now. Think before you write.

Reply

[-]

s00mika@reddit

Those people aren't buying desktops, they are using laptops.

Reply

[-]

Gippy_@reddit

> If anything is problematic it's their P-cores that aren't faster than what AMD has. Alder Lake P-cores were about 15-20% faster in IPC than Zen 3. The problem was there was virtually no IPC improvement from Alder Lake to Raptor Lake. The gains were were from increased L2 cache, and brute-forcing the clock speed and power consumption to desperately beat Zen 4.

Reply

[-]

Pimpmuckl@reddit

Not to mention that the die area the P-core takes up is a fair bit larger than what AMD's large cores use. That was especially true for Golden- and Raptor Cove and is even true today Lion Cove and Zen4 being very comparable in area, while Lion Cove is on N3B and Zen4 has a full fledged 512bit AVX-enabled FPU on the cheaper N4P node. Obviously we as consumers should not care about that but for the financial bottom lines, this is a severe problem for Intel. Not beating Zen4 on a more expensive node is really not great for the bottom line.

Reply

[-]

noyouarethemostwrong@reddit

I mean Apple is doing stuff with performance cores and efficiency cores on their CPUs and its working out well for them. Wonder why its working so much better on their end.

Reply

[-]

SmashStrider@reddit

With Skymont, I disagree. I would say that the E-Cores are actually the Saving Grace for Intel right now. Skymont is 1/3 the size of Lion Cove cores, while only being like 5-10% slower than them in IPC (meaning they have higher IPC than Zen 4 and even Raptor Cove, although only when they are connected to the same cache as the P-Cores). If anything, I would say Intel's current P-Cores are a failure. Lion Cove is slightly bigger than Zen 5, despite using a denser node and having no AVX-512 or SMT implemented into it (which increases size). Not to mention, it's IPC is slightly lower than Zen 5 too, and is much less efficient than Skymont. Intel needs to come up with a great new idea for their P-Cores, by either making them very small, or greatly increasing their IPC, otherwise it would be better for Intel to simply phase them out, and turn their existing E-Cores into their P-Cores.

Reply

[-]

Dangerman1337@reddit

The rumours have pointed that Intel is going to merge into a Unified Core design probably maybe scaling up E-Cores and move cache into Adamantine stacked cache up to 100s of mb of it. So imagine 600 series (Titan Lake?) in Q4 2028 being a Unified Design with 32 Cores with the highest SKU with like 256MB of stacked cache for example.

Reply

[-]

kittyburger@reddit

Any evidence to support your claims or just anecdotes lol

Reply

[-]

secretOPstrat@reddit

Apple is doing it right with E-cores. The m4 pro is 8/10p+4e while the m4 max is 12p+4e. Ecores are only good for idling/background tasks, the actual user experience very rarely is benefited by them, even in most productivity tasks. Intel selling gaming PCs with 6p+8e or 8p+12e is a ridiculous waste, a cheaper 8p+0e or 10p+4e would be better. Same goes for AMD's 4+8c Core laptops.

Reply

[-]

TwelveSilverSwords@reddit

Apple and Intel E-cores are designed with different objectives. For Intel, it's area efficiency. For Apple, it's power efficiency.

Reply

[-]

secretOPstrat@reddit

Semantics, Apple's E cores are smaller anyways and since they run at lower clocks they naturally become more efficient like with intel. Either way, you want your apps running on P cores only, going to E cores slows tasks down and adds latency, only when P cores are full E cores could be beneficial in most tasks. That's why users often disable their E cores on intel chips to get better gaming perf, so clearly E cores are not great on a desktop platform, more P cores would be better like apple is doing.

Reply

[-]

raydialseeker@reddit

It's a scheduler failure rather than a hardware one.

Reply

[-]

soggybiscuit93@reddit

P cores are the failure. 3x the size for only slightly more ST performance? At this point, most leakers are in agreement that there's only about 3 more years to go until P cores are gone entirely and E cores form the basis of the new unified core design

Reply

[-]

Zednot123@reddit

Yes, the recent e-cores is most likely Intel re-designing a new core from a less complex starting point. That was probably easier than to try and overhaul their big architecture. With all the legacy design decisions it must be carrying. Remodeling tends to always come with more compromises than a new build.

Reply

[-]

atomicthumbs@reddit

at least this time they're not trying to make Tejas

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

Funnily enough, the original Atom core was designed by the former Tejas team. Now they’re finally getting the last laugh as Atom takes over.

Reply

[-]

Caffdy@reddit

what about the rentable units?

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

They don’t exist.

Reply

[-]

chx_@reddit

https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/speeches/ag111896.htm > Today, we are able to make a prediction of where our technology may take us 15 years from now. Our best estimates, based upon past performance, existing technology and the laws of physics, show that the microprocessor of 2011 could look like this: > Frequency 10Ghz (4X the frequency of a microwave oven) > Andrew S. Grove > November 18, 1996

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

The P-core architecture was overhauled with Lion Cove. There results were still lackluster though. Intel letting Atom take over is more them acknowledging that the Atom team is executing far better than the big core team at the moment.

Reply

[-]

Die4Ever@reddit

Yeah it feels like another Core-M moment, when their new leaner design has surpassed their main core and becomes their new standard. And then we got Core 2 instead of Pentium 5

Reply

[-]

Demistr@reddit

Intel p cores are comically large compared to what AMD has.

Reply

[-]

theQuandary@reddit

Are they? Lion Cove is 4.53mm2 and Zen5 is 4.15mm2. That's an 8.4% size difference. The only comical difference is with Apple and Qualcomm ARM cores that are almost half the size for similar performance.

Reply

[-]

ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit

It is when Lion Cove is on an N3 process with 50% more density than N4 and the frequencies/performance end up being similar at the end.

Reply

[-]

theQuandary@reddit

This simply isn't true. Redwood Cove is on Intel 4 (worse than N5 let alone N4P) and is just 18% bigger at 5.05mm2. The fact is that all the hyper-dense claims about nodes go out the window as soon as you want high performance.

Reply

[-]

ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit

What is the point you're getting at here? When TSMC says N3B is 50% more dense than N4P is that not also against the theoretical maximum density of the latter? If AMD wouldn't be able to achieve that on N4P then do the relative differences not remain the same? Things don't look so good once you account for Zen 5 having things like AVX-512 present on die that Lion Cove does not, and definitely don't look over there at the M3 which is on the same node as Arrow Lake but far slimmer.

Reply

[-]

Demistr@reddit

I meant the new zen5d cores. Intel has nothing like that.

Reply

[-]

egguw@reddit

do e-cores even do anything for gaming? i thought most games can't even do more than 4 or 8 cores

Reply

[-]

Stingray88@reddit

Most games won’t, but some will. Sins of a Solar Empire 2 can scale to utilize every single thread you can give it. Even on a 96-core Threadripper.

Reply

[-]

RandomCollection@reddit

I wish all games were embarrassingly parallel, but most games seem to have dependent threads.

Reply

[-]

Stingray88@reddit

Yeah it’s really only viable for certain things. Sins of a Solar Empire 2 has enourmous space battles where every single missile and laser from hundreds of ships is fully simulated. They wanted to future proof the engine it wouldn’t be held back on newer/better hardware like the previous game was, so it’s crazy parallel. What’s really impressive is that it still runs incredibly well on lower power hardware. I get great performance on my steam deck too.

Reply

[-]

katt2002@reddit

> every single missile and laser from hundreds of ships is fully simulated Are they now in SoaSE2? I remember it was not in previous generation SoaSE1, pretty sure Stellaris too (they use aura based damage). Btw the 4X I'm playing lately Polaris Sector does simulate every single missile and damage source.

Reply

[-]

Stingray88@reddit

Yep! Everything is simulated now, so a ship could actually fly into the path of a missile and take the damage that was meant for another ship. It’s pretty wild to watch really big battles.

Reply

[-]

katt2002@reddit

Great! I thought it was mainly just visual upgrade over previous version, looks like it's a worthy upgrade. Thanks for the info.

Reply

[-]

Stingray88@reddit

It’s an *excellent* successor to the first IMO. So many incredible quality of life improvements that used to be way too tedious in the first game. For instance you can actually queue up new ship production from within a fleet, and the ships will be automatically queued up at the closest frigate/heavy factory (or a further factory if the closest has a queue) and then automatically path find to join up with the fleet. Tons of little things like that, it’s so much fun.

Reply

[-]

Devatator_@reddit

Synchronisation of data can slow down the game and if you don't do that you can get a lot of issues. That's typically why specific things are threaded when others aren't. Minecraft for example currently runs chunk management on multiple threads (by default. You can force it to use one only)

Reply

[-]

UsernameAvaylable@reddit

SoaSE can _occpy_ lots of cpus, but at that point you lose more performance from thread syncing than you gain by parallization. Protip: Just because talk manager shows many cores at 100% does not mean they do anything useful.

Reply

[-]

Stingray88@reddit

Good to know. I’m just impressed with how well it performs in general. From my high end desktop down to my Steamdeck, I got much better performance in the late game than the previous game.

Reply

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

depending on the game you may go as little as 4 (or even less on older games) to as large as 64 cores utilization.

Reply

[-]

ResponsibleJudge3172@reddit

1 P core and 5.2ghz OC 16 E cores Arrowlake are faster in gaming than default Arrowlake with good power consumption

Reply

[-]

soggybiscuit93@reddit

If games span more than 8 cores, they'll go onto E cores. But CPUs aren't made to play games. They're general-purpose components. Gaming is one of their tasks they *may* be used for by some people. As it stands now, P cores have about 10% higher IPC than E cores, and can clock about 1Ghz higher. E cores are seeing tremendous generational improvements, while Intel P cores continue to have the worse PPA in on the market. Give is a few years, and getting rid of P cores and building out the E cores is what'll happen.

Reply

[-]

sdk5P4RK4@reddit

They were really just a way to make up for being so far behind in process, not a well designed component for consumer benefit.

Reply

[-]

Careful_Okra8589@reddit

Desktop there isnt a need for them. Just give us more P cores.

Reply

[-]

windozeFanboi@reddit

They're not a failure on their own... But they did cause massive pain points in software compatitibility (RIP AVX512) and Windows Scheduler (RIP gaming performance, what the hell Arrow lake?) But... they did provide meaningful multithreaded performance gains. But again.. What the hell Arrow lake? Where did SMT go? :O Skymont is pretty good for what it is. On the other hand, ARM pressure will massively intensify in the next 2 years. AMD better deliver with Zen6 and whatever Intel has itself. Idk how nvidia is gonna go long term, but i do believe that standard ARM cores will be more than competitive enough if they roll their own PC SoC with the coveted nvidia graphics...

Reply

[-]

UnsaidRnD@reddit

Don't they require a lot of optimization from the part of game devs (and desktop CPUs are mostly for games, let's be honest? :D for heavy workload there are xeons and threadrippers ), and it just never happened?

Reply

[-]

0pyrophosphate0@reddit

They didn't make E cores because they thought they would be *good*, they made E cores because there was no other way to keep up with AMD on power efficiency. Just like mobile chips had to do 10 years ago when their manufacturing process was behind.

Reply

[-]

jaaval@reddit

The idea that small core is more efficient made sense years ago but not anymore. They are more efficient in most of the range but not on the top performance area that is the most relevant part. However that is not the point of E-cores. The point is to get more performance of same chip area. In that they are amazing and absolutely a success. The idea that consumers don’t need this because you are a gamer and don’t need them in most games is not really sound.

Reply

[-]

Nicholas-Steel@reddit

> The idea that small core is more efficient made sense years ago but not anymore. Intel's E Cores have always primarily focused on being *space* efficient. They achieve good performance for the amount of physical space they take up. That doesn't mean they are good performers.

Reply

[-]

AngryRussianHD@reddit

I don’t know why people complain about E cores. I had the 12900k since launch and it’s been amazing so far for my use cases (gaming and ml training). I never really noticed any scheduling issues whatsoever. If you don’t like e cores then don’t buy Intel lol

Reply

[-]

Different_Ad9756@reddit

What's the baseline for failure, cause if it's just better than the previous strategy, E-Cores are a win For Alder & Raptor Lake, an E-Core cluster(4) take up slightly more die space than a P-Core So for example, an all P-Core die size equivalent to a 12900K, would be a 10 Core chip, which wouldn't be much better at gaming and would just get destroyed by the R9 7900X At least with E-cores, intel is competitive to it's AMD competitors at the same price(ignoring power consumption of course) You can argue Intel's approach is just bad and AMD's C-Cores are a better option(no scheduling issues, no issues with AVX512 and SMT etc)

Reply

[-]

Onceforlife@reddit

Bro what are you smoking? The ecores are fire, the scheduling is the fabric and the design outside of the cores themselves, you’re conflating the two issues

Reply

[-]

OfficialDeathScythe@reddit

No? I upgraded from a quad core to a 10 core with 4 being E cores. It gives me the ability now to record videos while doing anything that the other 6 cores can handle like video games, discord, YouTube videos in the background, music, etc. It essentially feels like I now have a 6 core CPU reserved for gaming and rendering, then I have my old cpu essentially, that runs everything that didn’t need so much power. I used to lag if I had OBS discord and a game up. I’ve seen so many good stories about p cores and e cores giving the computer more performance without sacrificing any one programs performance

Reply

[-]

_PPBottle@reddit

They are pretty decent, but OS scheduling shenanigans is what hinders them the most.

Reply

[-]

Pillokun@reddit

e cores sucks.. why? because they are often mixed into a cpu aimed for desktop lowering the perf of the desktop cpu. Every time a workload is assigned to an e core the perf goes down compared to if it would have been on the p cores. not even that but every time the system must decide which core it is supposed to be assigned workload to, it actually makes the system stall/wait compared to a system with a homogenous cpu, where only added latency is from how far away the core and its l3$ is from the l3$ where the necessary data may be located at to continue the workload.

Reply

[-]

StarbeamII@reddit

Do you make the same arguments against hyperthreading? How is scheduling an E core that much different than scheduling processes onto hyperthreads?

Reply

[-]

Pillokun@reddit

hyper threading is using available resources of a core, e cores are just slower cores than the p cores. U dont need to use hyperthreading, u can disable them if there is workload stealing and the like occurring which may lower the perf. E cores are always slower than p cores. there are there because intel just need some more threads for workloads that demands lots of threads, but in all honestly a gpu will actually be a better fit in such cases anyway. and even if u disable the e cores then u still add a physical distance between the p cores on the ringbus, so when a p core want some info/data from the l3$ of another p core then there is a distance worth a p-core/e core complex that it needs to move past to get to the data/info found on that p core, and there fore adds latency even when the e core is disabled.

Reply

[-]

Tiflotin@reddit

E-Cores is what made me leave intel after being a long time loyal customer. Had the 12900k and had awful stutters when gaming due to what I imagine was workloads being passed around through P-Cores and E-Cores. Idc how good the scheduler gets, whenever someone has a software fix for a hardware problem, its a dogshit product to begin with.

Reply

[-]

III-V@reddit

> Idc how good people claim the scheduler gets, whenever someone has a software fix for a hardware problem, its a dogshit product to begin with. Then all processors are garbage, because that's basically the whole point of an OS kernel.

Reply

[-]

Tiflotin@reddit

If you can't see the difference between how a normal cpu scheduling works vs a hybrid architecture, idk what to tell you bud,

Reply

[-]

StarbeamII@reddit

Even without E-cores not all threads are the same, and the OS has to contend with Hyperthreading/SMT and favored cores that boost higher than other cores.

Reply

[-]

psydroid@reddit

It's more of an OS issue than a hardware issue. Sure, it's more complicated, but phones have had heterogenous core clusters for a long time and work just fine. Why can't a desktop OS do the same thing?

Reply

[-]

Wander715@reddit (OP)

Yep right there with you, pretty close to ditching my 12600K and jumping to AM5. People are presenting some good use cases for E cores in the thread but 99% of the time they're talking about servers, workstations, or laptops. For my use case in a standard desktop setup using my PC for gaming, school, and day to day compute the E cores are virtually useless and only end up causing problems occasionally. The Windows 11 scheduler is just not up to par to effectively manage P and E core scheduling in many applications.

Reply

[-]

greggm2000@reddit

Why don't you just disable the E-cores on your 12600K outright? You wouldn't get any of the issues you mention, and it's not like you'd really be losing much even outside of gaming. I've done the same with my 12700K since launch, and it's been great, no issues, and I'm running Windows 10. AM5 is good, mind you, especially the 9800X3D, and if you can afford the jump, why not do it?

Reply

[-]

Wander715@reddit (OP)

If I'm disabling cores on my CPU I'd rather just upgrade at that point, it's a bit silly if I have to take those measure to get a decent experience while playing games. Yep currently looking at sales for AM5 around Black Friday. I think AMD's non-hybrid core design just appeals to me a lot more and my use case. Originally went with Intel back in 2021 when 12th gen was the new thing and the best value at the time, can't imagine me going back to them for awhile after I switch.

Reply

[-]

greggm2000@reddit

Yeah, I go back and forth a bit on whether or not I should upgrade from my 12700K (with DDR4).. my rough estimate is that I should see around a 25% improvement in most games, which isn't really enough to get me to spend the money for a new CPU+MB+RAM. Most likely I'll wait for Zen 6.

Reply

[-]

timetobeanon@reddit

Why do you only reply few comments that agree with you lol

Reply

[-]

IKnowCodeFu@reddit

I think it’s obvious that Apple caught Intel with their pants down, and Intel is struggling to respond with anything meaningful.

Reply

[-]

Helpdesk_Guy@reddit

I think Intel was caught with their pants down way earlier than just by Apple – Think AMD a couple of years prior.

Reply

[-]

Roxalon_Prime@reddit

For desktop Intel essentially invented bulldozer. For notebooks its good

Reply

[-]

pulimento@reddit

I think that the problem is more at the software side, at least in Windows 11. As some redditors have commented, it makes no sense when you're doing something computing-intensive (e.g. compiling, video encoding), and P-cores are almost idle and E-cores are sweating. I found the implementation in M-series of Apple much more reasonable. it's not e-cores fault per-se, those are pretty fine

Reply

[-]

Unlikely-Today-3501@reddit

Nonsense marketing gibberish. I will never buy a desktop CPU with different cores, it makes no sense, it has no advantage. Of course, software can't handle this, because almost nobody will write code for different cores. It goes against universality. But Intel spent a lot of money on marketing, so everyone else is parroting how cool E-cores are.

Reply

[-]

F9-0021@reddit

If they were a failure you wouldn't be seeing AMD introducing them.

Reply

[-]

Geddagod@reddit

To be fair, AMD is taking a quite different approach for their dense cores than Intel. I wouldn't use that as a reason for Intel's E-cores being successful.

Reply

[-]

_OVERHATE_@reddit

Failure!??? They keep selling old architecture shit undervolted cores on new CPUs and people keep buying them lmao, sounds like a success to me

Reply

[-]

Geddagod@reddit

The E-cores might have many faults, but old architecture was never one of them. The E-cores architectures always seem more abnormal/novel than their accompanying P-core archs.

Reply

[-]

reddit_equals_censor@reddit

>was the only way they'd compete with AMD on the Intel 7 node. NO NO NO! we're not accepting intel renaming a process node AFTER they released it. 13th and 14th gen chips are intel 10 nm! don't use their bullshit insanity! the node names are already complete nonsense, but NO, i won't accept intel throwing a sticker on an old node to try to appear close to tsmc. and i recommend, that you don't do either. 13th and 14th are using intel's nightmare node of 10 nm. \_\_\_ now in regards to whether e-cores are a failure or a success. i'd say a big failure. we can see this by comparing it to amd. amd is competing in multithreading performance without e-cores with old chiplet packaging and cheaper nodes. but hey let's just put that down to much better core design by amd. alright then let's go to how amd handles apu power efficiency and die size. amd is using c cores, which are just compressed versions of normal cores, that clock a bit lower and that's it, while taking up a bunch less space. this means, that amd can throw those cores next to 2 normal cores to have max boost speed and have 0 scheduling issues as you can have them all connect to the same l3 cache. amd's smt is also better than intel's smt, so intel trying to throw shade at smt with dropping it in new cpus is nonsense. and i have to wonder how well cpus will do in the future with just 6 p cores and NO smt. cpus, that are already shit performance wise compared to amd. and logical to physical core has no latency issues of course, while e-cores to p-cores has major latency issues and the issue, that an e-core has no where near the performance of a p-core, so you gotta go HANDS ON on scheduling games properly, so that no thread, that requires high performance touches the e-cores. now were e-cores a benefit for intel? well it helped them keep up in multithreading benchmarks at least for a while? it didn't help power efficiency. it improved/helped to somewhat keep up with performance/die area though. imo e-cores are overall a bad idea, but don't worry the top intel cpu development team is working to remove e-cores anyways with rentable units ONLY cpu designs. i mean the top cpu design team is working on it for years. it will be a massive comeback right? and also eventually remove the "need" for e-cores, right? RIGHT? oh nvm, the ceo cancelled the rentable units development :D \_\_\_ we might still see the removal of e-cores with other designs in the future though.

Reply

[-]

Geddagod@reddit

>we can see this by comparing it to amd. >amd is competing in multithreading performance without e-cores with old chiplet packaging and cheaper nodes. RPL literally competed with Zen 4 in nT perf without any sort of chiplet packaging and a cheaper node. Idk why you are also comparing ARL vs Zen 5, when the point is to evaluate just the E-cores. There's tons of dubious decisions in ARL that hurt its competitiveness that aren't at all related with the E-cores. > but hey let's just put that down to much better core design by amd. What lol, why are we putting that down to much better core design? >amd is using c cores, which are just compressed versions of normal cores, that clock a bit lower and that's it, while taking up a bunch less space. >this means, that amd can throw those cores next to 2 normal cores to have max boost speed and have 0 scheduling issues as you can have them all connect to the same l3 cache. AMD's C-core size ratios just don't work like this. It's not even close to a 2:1 area gap. TBF, LNC and SKMT aren't perfect 4:1 ratios anymore either, but based on how they are arranged on the die, it's pretty clear that unless you have an obscene amount of P-cores, the extra space used by using 1 P-core rather than a 4E-core cluster won't really be enough for additional P-cores. I also find it a bit ironic that at the end there you highlight that AMD's implementation can have them all connect to the same L3 cache. That's not how AMD is using them in Strix Point at all. And in desktop a weakness for AMD is that scaling past 8 cores requires them to add more CCDs, or literally separate the L3 cache. >amd's smt is also better than intel's smt, so intel trying to throw shade at smt with dropping it in new cpus is nonsense Ah yes, that's why Intel dropped SMT.... The rest of your comment is more just unhinged ranting, yikes. Show me on this doll where Intel hurt you type shit.

Reply

[-]

iDontSeedMyTorrents@reddit

> NO NO NO! we're not accepting intel renaming a process node AFTER they released it. > > > 13th and 14th gen chips are intel 10 nm! > > > don't use their bullshit insanity! the node names are already complete nonsense, but NO, i won't accept intel throwing a sticker on an old node to try to appear close to tsmc. > > > and i recommend, that you don't do either. > > > 13th and 14th are using intel's nightmare node of 10 nm. You acknowledge node names are already meaningless but you're still saying "well, akshually it's 10nm." It was renamed to better reflect where it competes, and the fact that it's worlds apart from the actual nightmare original 10nm or even Ice Lake. Things were basically all good with Tiger Lake. It's been a good node for many years.

Reply

[-]

Jaznavav@reddit

E-cores are quickly shaping up to be more competitive than P-cores, if the current trends continue. Skymont is a really good core.

Reply

[-]

Kryohi@reddit

This is absolutely true, but the point of OP I think was more about Big.little chips. And on desktop and servers I would agree it's fairly useless. Either keep the P-cores or make E-cores go up to 6GHz, like AMD is doing with the combo zenXC (dense) and ZenX (highest performance). Combining the two in a single chip is only really useful for mobile chips.

Reply

[-]

Wander715@reddit (OP)

For servers I agree there's a great application there. Again my post is focusing on their presence in the desktop lineup which I think is mostly useless. I think Intel would be having more success in the desktop market right now if they had maybe 1-2 CPUs with E cores for people that actually have use for them with the additional MT performance, and then the rest of the line is P core only chips focusing on ST performance for stuff like gaming.

Reply

[-]

StYhK@reddit

I love the e-cores on my 14900k cuz I can have 10 streams running in the background and still get stutter free game play.

Reply

[-]

SpiralSwagManHorse@reddit

AFAIK, e-cores were never designed to be particularly energy efficient, the goal was always to make them space efficient and slightly more energy efficient as a consequence. For me personally, the gain in core count was not worth sacrificing avx512, but I would not call them a failure. I suspect that without this design intel would be in an even thougher spot against AMD with very few reasons to pick intel over amd (if any).

Reply

[-]

xCAI501@reddit

> AFAIK, e-cores were never designed to be particularly energy efficient, the goal was always to make them space efficient Intel's E-cores are tuned to be more area efficient, Apple's are tuned to be more energy efficient.

Reply

[-]

SpiralSwagManHorse@reddit

Yes, I meant intel e-cores in particular.

Reply

[-]

xpk20040228@reddit

E cores are useful as intel literally cannot compete with 16 core Ryzens without them. There's two issues, one is Intel's P core cost a bit amount of die space compared to Zen. And they find it hard to improve it as it is already so huge. You can see that in ARL where E cores improved by 30~50% but less than 10% for the P cores. The second issue is the ringbus and multi core performance. Intel has failed to move beyond ringbus on desktop so they at most can do 10/12 cores if they are all P cores, that wouldn't do against 16 core zen 5. E core helps with this as 4 e cores only takes one ringbus stop, giving them chance to do 8+16 as rn.

Reply

[-]

71651483153138ta@reddit

Imo it's the only good thing about the last intel generations. Disable E-cores, play a game that doesn't use all the P-cores (ie. it's not bottlenecked by core count), and still it gets crushed by AMD. It's the P-cores that suck.

Reply

[-]

RedTuesdayMusic@reddit

I would have a use for a CPU with only E-cores. The problem is that these (N100) have single-channel memory, which is a dealbreaker. I *could* have a use for a CPU with only P-cores, but they don't exist and if they did AMD would still be better. I have no use for asymmetrical CPUs with both core types, because I'm on Win 10 IoT until 2032 on the productivity machines. As for the Linux systems I run, they are better off on AMD. Basically, this stunt has made Intel null and void for me. Whenever I look into an Intel solution there is some kind of dealbreaker for what I'm building.

Reply

[-]

ghost103429@reddit

To be honest Intel would've been better served by including a DPU into their chip design as a way to offload multi-threaded workloads off of the CPU . Something that would greatly benefit AI, Database, Media, Cryptographic, Filesystem workloads among others and compete directly against Nvidia's CUDA.

Reply

[-]

NuclearReactions@reddit

They started selling e-cores to the type of crowd who buys their CPUs and overclocks them on day one in order to apply the turbo boost frequency to all cores. I never understood the sense of having them on high performance CPUs, especially the K series which AFAIK is mostly for gaming

Reply

[-]

Plus_sleep214@reddit

This post is a certified /r/hardware moment.

Reply

[-]

Ok_Assignment_2127@reddit

I like how the post has a bunch of upvotes because not-AMD = bad but it’s all comments saying OP is wrong and every comment from OP is downvoted

Reply

[-]

gatorbater5@reddit

i assume this is sarcastic criticism? it's generating discussion. i have a 12600k like OP and i'm enjoying this retrospective. when i bought it i thought it was a normal 6 core cpu with 4 extra cores for handling background tasks.

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

Honestly, as we see time and again, a gaming machine nowadays is good with "only" eight powerful cores. Games are notoriously hard to parallelize past a certain threshold. Whether E cores help or not, it highly depends on your use case, really. Personally, I highly doubt most users do actually have a case for multithreading. Like, hell - most programming benchmarks are unrealistic - they do a full build from scratch, and that is something that happens quite rarely. Incremental builds are much more common. The goal of having low power cores makes sense, but you don't need twenty of them. You need four, and good scheduler and governor support to detect when the load is light enough you can start shutting down the big ones. And frankly, I'm not convinced E cores are more energy efficient. Iirc there was something about ELP cores? Also: saying Intel is doing big.LITTLE is like saying AMD is doing Hyperthreading.

Reply

[-]

clingbat@reddit

>Games are notoriously hard to parallelize past a certain threshold. Cities:skylines 2 laughs at you. It can fully utilize up to 32 threads in all its poorly optimized glory. LTT showed as much loading a 1 million population city into a machine with a Threadripper PRO 7000. The game jacked 32 cores to 100% load lol.

Reply

[-]

boringestnickname@reddit

Good lord what a mess that game is. Have they done much to improve it since release?

Reply

[-]

clingbat@reddit

It actually runs a good bit better than release, but they still have a lot of work to do. The biggest thing that's lagging is official support for third party / custom assets, that's really holding the game back. That along with continued weird issues with the simulation that you need mods to mitigate lol.

Reply

[-]

RandomCollection@reddit

Sounds like the game should have been an early access game.

Reply

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

They ran out of money, Paradox said release or close studio. It didnt help that Unity fucked them over royally as well. Promised features, they built for those features, features never arrived.

Reply

[-]

clingbat@reddit

No but adding more cores with higher frequencies does push up the population you can support before the simulation comes to a crawl, that is pretty well established at this point. That's why 7800x3d is kind of shit for the game vs. more cores with higher frequencies a la 14700k/14900k or 9900x/9950x, which is a rarity in gaming.

Reply

[-]

Strazdas1@reddit

Paradox games can do the same unless your game is script-heavy (which is still singlethreaded).

Reply

[-]

soggybiscuit93@reddit

E cores aren't there for background tasks. They're there because they provide more nT performance per sq.mm of die space than a P core. They're more efficient that P cores below a certain wattage, and can be spammed for cheap. They've allowed Intel to compete against 16 core parts despite only having 12 stops on their ring bus. 12P cores would not be competing in productivity against a 9950X as closely as an 8+16 does now.

Reply

[-]

jaskij@reddit

Ah, thanks. Hmm... Honestly? Yeah. They're near useless for the average user. An office worker won't notice a difference between 8P+20E and just 8P. Hell, I probably wouldn't as a software dev. I think people just don't realize how good modern machines are, and that a lot of tasks that used to be high end are now regular.

Reply

[-]

soggybiscuit93@reddit

>an office workers won't notice a difference between 8P+20E and just 8P Yeah, that's why we don't buy Office staff the highest end desktop chip Intel makes, though The highest end, $500+ (just for the CPU), high core count desktop chips from Intel and AMD aren't made for the average user.

Reply

[-]

resetallthethings@reddit

TBH they wouldn't notice a difference between 8P and just 8E either in all likelihood

Reply

[-]

F9-0021@reddit

An office worker doesn't need anything more than a laptop or i3 desktop. If you need anything more than that, it's either for gaming or heavy productivity.

Reply

[-]

ET3D@reddit

I see E cores on desktop as mainly a marketing move. On mobile they have some power benefits, but on desktop they're mainly used to inflate core count and score some points in benchmarks. Have they been a failure? If you look at the marketing goal, no, I think they've been successful. So if you're talking about what Intel was hoping for, I think that's what it was hoping for. And since these chips have also been used as is for mobile, they have meaning in that context. But I agree that for most desktop users they don't offer any benefit and sometimes hurt the experience. In a sense it's like ray tracing on GeForce GPUs. It was pointless for Turing from a user point of view, but it was a selling point, and it worked well for NVIDIA on that front. Today it's less pointless for users. Perhaps E cores will also find their place.

Reply

[-]

jaaval@reddit

No benefit for consumers? Average consumer is not a PC gamer.

Reply

[-]

ResponsibleJudge3172@reddit

Have you looked at Arrowlake E core benchmarks? Those E cores are FASTER THAN ZEN 4

Reply

[-]

StarbeamII@reddit

In what application would a 12P/0E CPU perform better than 8P/16E CPU that uses the same amount of silicon? The only thing I could think of is if you need AVX512.

Reply

[-]

ConsistencyWelder@reddit

Yeah and there are games that are starting to utilize more cores than the typical 4 cores. MSFS 2024 is designed for multicores and seems to distribute the load over alle the cores that are available, but I would assume they avoid e-cores because it would slow the game down and lead to stutters, like they did in Star Citizen.

Reply

[-]

sneggercookoons@reddit

had a 13600k for over 2yrs sick of the stuttering and 1% lows so i finally disabled the e cores and oc the p cores to 5.3ghz stock volts 1.2v and BOOM stuttering GONE fuck intel for forcing this stupid shit on games for almost 4 years then keep back peddling and finally fucking us in the ass with rustolimn inside and horrid 14 15th gen going back to amd as soon as my 9800x3d build arrives

Reply

[-]

Pillokun@reddit

yep, that is what I am have been doing since lga1700 launched, at least after 2 month or so when I was able to turn the e cores off. have also done that on my 12900k, and 2x 13900kf cpus. When I am say at high fps in fps games I notice the stutters so badly with the e cores on. The moment I disable them it just gets smoooth or rather less spiky/droppy so to say. there was a dude playing warzone on the new resurgence map and at 1080p medium settings he was at 180fps with an 14900k with e cores on and 6000mt/s ram with an 4080s and my current warzone righ 12700k wihout e cores, 7600ram settings and 6900xt is at 240-300fps with no stutters what so ever. have 7800x3d but that is not such a good cpu for warzone with my amd gpus.

Reply

[-]

sneggercookoons@reddit

funny in my gigabyte z690 ud4 e cores off is called gaming mode, why didnt intel do this in windows too with their rediculous APO programs, why they still push this shit while sliding backwards in every way and selling their hq's lol!

Reply

[-]

Slyons89@reddit

big.LITTLE is a name trademarked by ARM for their line of heterogeneous core processors. It’s not a generic name for it.

Reply

[-]

Astigi@reddit

Failure of hybrid design is both cores support different levels of instructions. OS Scheduler can't know where to send applications effectively. AMD doesn't have this problem since both types of cores can run the same instructions

Reply

[-]

Not-the-best-name@reddit

I think Lunar lake shows how amazing this is. The 8 core lunar lake chip outperforms my old desktop 9700k and it does so on like 15w in a laptop that can go 10 hours. I did miss the entire 10x intel series on desktop the last few years so can't really comment on your specific question though. I just want a lunar lake laptop so bad.

Reply

[-]

TalkingCrap69@reddit

>Overall I don't see the payoff that Intel was initially hoping for and instead it's made for a clunky architecture with inconsistent performance on Windows. I'd argue that is more of a Microsoft problem

Reply

[-]

RandomCollection@reddit

Skymont, which is the current generation of E core, is actually really good in terms of the performance per mm2. It arguably is the best part of Arrow Lake right now.

Reply

[-]

Sylanthra@reddit

Yea, well Intel thinks it's good enough for servers https://www.anandtech.com/show/21276/intel-previews-sierra-forest-with-288-e-cores-announces-granite-rapids-d-for-2025-launch-at-mwc-2024

Reply

[-]

vinciblechunk@reddit

AVX-512 is Intel's party piece, but they can't put it on the E-cores, so they just skip it and pretend it doesn't matter, then it breaks every scheduler ever because there's no such thing as "just use P-cores for AVX-512 processes" when every process is an AVX-512 process because libc and memcpy are using it, so then they just e-fuse off their whole flagship feature on the P-cores too. Am I all caught up?

Reply

[-]

Brisngr368@reddit

How much of this though is just do to window's terrible scheduling? I feel like with this + AMD having issues with CCD threading and the rediculous 9000 launch, it seems that Microsoft's bad implementations are holding back both intel and AMD on multi threading performance.

Reply

[-]

Williams_Gomes@reddit

I think it's totally the opposite. The E cores was what brough intel back to the game in productivity workloads, if wasn't for that, they would be in a worse position than they are nowadays. I kinda agree that the scheduling problems hurts the overall experience with the products, but I think that's the path we are aiming now, heterogenous processors, so things should keep improving as time goes.

Reply

[-]

6950@reddit

Have you seen skymont it's a solid core for the majority of workloads it has same integer and fp performance as Zen4! Source geekerwan https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TFu2iorqU_o#&t=168

Reply

[-]

not_a_novel_account@reddit

No, completely the opposite. E-cores are the only thing working. Get rid of the useless P-cores and give me 3x more E-cores. Not everyone uses computers to play games, a lot of us make a living with these things believe it or not.

Reply

[-]

bubblesort33@reddit

AMD has started to go that way themselves on mobile so far. Wouldn't be shocked if Zen6 will feature 8 or 12 Zen6 cores, and and like 16 or 24 Zen6c cores.

Reply

[-]

justgord@reddit

Time to split up Intel ... Pcore only CPU division and Ecore only CPU division .. Intel Easy vs Intel Peasy ! the linux thread scheduling guys will be forever grateful.

Reply

[-]

PastaPandaSimon@reddit

I don't have a problem with them existing, as the hardware is not bad, as others noted. But Intel using heterogenous architectures on Windows is a major reason why I'm not currently looking into Intel CPUs. Because I value my CPU working predictably and consistently, much more than some extra MT performance that I need very rarely. I feel that Intel's heterogenous designs go against that goal with the software I use (Windows, games).

Reply

[-]

cuttino_mowgli@reddit

I think it's "like big.LITTLE" but not really big.LITTLE. Kudos for Intel for improving their e-cores but still I'm at the camp of just do what AMD is doing right now. P-cores and a power optimized P-core with the same architecture to lessen the complexity on desktop. Intel's worst enemy right now is Microsoft's bullshit OS.

Reply

[-]

laffer1@reddit

It’s their lack of guidance to os devs in general

Reply

[-]

gayfucboi@reddit

their Performance per watt never got close to Apple’s E cores so in that regard they are a failure. Intel never got the right balance of P to E cores that Apple was able to successfully engineer for several generations. Even Arm’s little core was never great at performance per watt, but their mid core down clocked is way better in terms of efficiency. OoO execution really matters here, along by with supporting the same instruction set as the big cores. Intel has gotten better lately, but probably too late to matter. They can either just work on improving the big cores and power, or scaling up E-cores into a mid level performance while keeping efficiency high.

Reply

[-]

the_hat_madder@reddit

I think people fail to understand that gamers are a niche market and hardcore performance junkies are a niche in a niche. The lion's share of silicon doesn't got to the gaming or even consumer desktop market. Yes. Windows scheduling sucks but you can fix that with programs like Process Lasso. Intel's architecture is still tops for multithreaded performance and efficiency. That's ideal for general use, productivity, casual gaming, workstations and servers....aka the majority of use cases.

Reply

[-]

Kougar@reddit

They pose problems, yes, but I don't think you realize that the E-cores are also in many respects the only reason Intel's chips remained as competitive as they did for the past four years. I also think the issues and problems of E-cores are also downplayed, even four years later people still have issues with thread scheduling and the resulting stuttering and lag problems from it today. People will certainly notice framerate mins dropping sharply, but they will be unlikely to realize those worse framerate mins are because threads got scheduled to slower clocked, data starved E-cores. Only the more tech-conscious are even going to be aware that it's their choice of CPU instead of simply blaming the game dev, or Windows, or their PC itself. Was it the right move? At the end of the day it really comes down to the use case an the workloads. E-cores never have and never will make sense for gaming rigs, but for mini and micro-PC builds all the way up to a powerful rendering box or any other workstation workload they have kept Intel performance competitive. The real issue is I'm not sure E-cores will be as useful going into the future as they need to be, E-cores will always be data starved due to how they are connected to the ring bus. The ring bus topology itself is not efficient for a large number of cores, there are latency & efficiency reasons for why Intel instead used a mesh bus topology for 10-12+ core processors. Intel sidestepped this by connecting each four E-core cluster to the ring bus as if it was a single core, but there's no wriggle room left and no real way to scale things given the tradeoffs involved. The more Intel improves on the E-cores the more data starved they will become. The 9800X3D application performance results alone are interesting given the X3D cache is suddenly now boosting application performance, not just game performance, which reviewers have surmised to be a result of data starvation from the IO die and/or other bottlenecks in the chiplet topology. Big cores, especially those running AVX2 and AVX-512 workloads require large data pipes to stay fed. CPUs (and especially GPUs) performance is going to be tied to how much data it can move around and how quickly. Intel would probably have to design a new novel way to connect its E-cores to deal with this for them to continue to be useful as CPU performance scales through the rest of this decade, if they simply don't just adopt AMD's approach to this problem.

Reply

[-]

Pajarico@reddit

they are amazing for virtualization, productivity and low power server applications, i would say its the best thing intel did in the last 5 years at least

Reply

[-]

zakats@reddit

I intend to use the silly quantity of cores for a NAS that has a HTPC + couch gaming VM. I was able to get a high core count cpu a lot cheaper than AMD. None of these companies are worth me being loyal, they've absolutely earned the opposite result, and so I shop for products by value every time I build a system.

Reply

[-]

Limited_Distractions@reddit

To me it's less of an issue with e cores themselves and more an issue with how they have to design the product stack. Something like the 14900K has to have both the highest boost clocks and the most e cores and it's convenient when you can utilize both, but what if you're just buying it for one of those things? It's more like their historical HEDT parts than their historical fastest-for-gaming parts. In a vacuum, something like Gracemont is really the most impressive thing Intel has going right now, so it's hard for me to criticize it as a complete failure though

Reply

[-]

majoroutage@reddit

Meanwhile I'm trying to put together a low-power build and would be all over a Socket 1700 chip with ONLY E-Cores.

Reply

[-]

xbarracuda95@reddit

It's been great for idle power draw, very important for things like NAS and servers.

Reply

[-]

midnightdiabetic@reddit

E cores are great imo. It’s the P cores that are the problem

Reply

[-]

BuchMaister@reddit

big.LITTLE is the way to go, high IPC cost too much die space and give too little in return. E-cores are what made intel stay afloat in the last several generations and they do help with efficiency when they are designed right (like with LNL). the "1% and .1% framedrops" I haven't seen in my machine with 12900K, and even if I did who said the E-cores are responsible and not something else? There are different issue in the current Intel CPUs, the E-cores are not the source of the problem. Even AMD started similar approach with Compact cores.

Reply

[-]

Adromedae@reddit

Intel client CPUs have been underwhelming for a couple generations at least. Intel's big.LITTLE woes are a compounding issue regardless Intel's HW (esp the ring) and Microsoft's SW (esp the Windows scheduler).

Reply

[-]

Hen-stepper@reddit

Unless a person is rendering video, or tasks like that, e-cores are the worst things Intel have added IMHO. When I upgraded from a i7-10700k (0 e-cores) to a i7-14700k (12 e-cores), games would pause for like 2-3 full seconds. It read this was because the e-cores take on big processes at the wrong times and slow everything down. Since switching to a 9800x3d, with 8 performance cores and 0 e-cores, those pauses stopped happening completely. And in fact fps never dips at all. All Intel had to do was follow trends and adjust to the market after the 5800x3d became huge. Instead of playing with cache size, the kept pumping out their e-core garbage.

Reply

[-]

xX_Kawaii_Comrade_Xx@reddit

just got a new system with win 11 and 14600k and tried many games. the stuttering and low 1% lows could be fixed by tempering with the xmp profile/ memory timings. beyond that, games seem to use the E cores a little bit but not to the point of 100% maxxing out the cpu which is great. its not even helpful to use process lasso or anything because it kept crashing but it also didnt do much. I like the e cores

Reply

[-]

JonWood007@reddit

I dont think they're a failure. I do admit there are scheduling issues but id rather have them than not have them, especially on something like a 12600k. It's like saying hyperthreading was a failure back in 2009 on 1st gen i7s. And people did actually think like that back then, and through the sandy bridge era.

Reply

[-]

greggm2000@reddit

E-cores have their uses, so do P-cores. It's been overall successful for Intel, but as you point out, it's got it's downsides. Obviously Intel Arrow Lake has issues, but I don't think that's related to it having heterogenous cores.

Reply

[-]

CammKelly@reddit

Yes and no. The ecores are obviously good at their job, but the differing ISA set between them and the big cores causes plenty of scheduling issues. But ecores were supposed to be a stop gap until we got to rentable units, but that seems to have disappeared so what is Intel left with now but a mess of half archs?

Reply

[-]

BookinCookie@reddit

>But ecores were supposed to be a stop gap until we got to rentable units, but that seems to have disappeared. E-cores weren’t a stopgap solution. They were Intel’s primary plan for increasing the MT PPA of their products. And “rentable units” never was a thing.

Reply

[-]

greggm2000@reddit

"rentable units" was a rumor, we have no way of knowing how true it was. I don't think it matters anyway, since if a feature doesn't end up in a shipping product, it's irrelevant.

Reply

[-]

DarkseidAntiLife@reddit

To put things in perspective, AMD gives us 16 big core desktop parts in an efficient power envelope. Intel can only give 8 big cores and a ton of smaller E-cores and still consumes more power. Yes hybrid architecture big-little makes zero sense on a desktop PC. Intel couldn't get their efficiency down so they had no other choice but to go this route. It's a massive failure

Reply

[-]

MixtureBackground612@reddit

Nop https://x.com/lafaiel/status/1850790240946147808 https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/intels-arrow-lake-chips-arent-winning-any-awards-for-gaming-performance-but-i-think-its-new-e-cores-deserve-a-gold-star/

Reply

[-]

InvertedPickleTaco@reddit

E cores have kept Intel competitive. Without them, Intel would of had to resort to full fat 12 and 16 P core designs, which would of had many issues given the power and cooling needed for Intels designs when pushed in gaming, productivity, or benchmarks. I think Intels biggest issue has been their failure to keep up with TSMC on fabrication nodes (which ties in directly with poor performance per watt per rack in the datacenter) and the loss of consumer and prosumer confidence with the 13th and 14th generation issues.

Reply

[-]

Waluigi-@reddit

Id honestly take an all ecore design (preferably 16 cores). Like how they do the xeons now. Arrow lake ecores beat alder lake pcores now.

Reply

[-]

OGigachaod@reddit

This is why I went with the 12700k over the 12600k, for the 2 extra P cores. Then use park control to tell Windows 11 to prefer the P cores and things run smoother.

Reply

[-]

terroradagio@reddit

My Handbrake encodes love E-cores.

Reply

[-]

yabucek@reddit

It feels like Intel is scrambling with every generation and doesn't have a coherent strategy for its future. Apart from the big little debacle and efficiency roller coaster, they've now sworn off multithreading for the second time in recent memory (9th gen). With how things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if they bring back AVX512 for Ultra 300 and say it's the next big thing.

Reply

[-]

AutoModerator@reddit

Hello! It looks like this might be a question or a request for help that violates [our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/about/rules) on /r/hardware. If your post is about a computer build or tech support, please delete this post and resubmit it to /r/buildapc or /r/techsupport. If not please click report on this comment and the moderators will take a look. Thanks! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/hardware) if you have any questions or concerns.*

Reply