My guess is it’s treating the “extra” cores as a throttling mechanism without throttling. If your thermal budget is 9 (8 + 2*1/2), and you operate normally with

My guess is it’s treating the “extra” cores as a throttling mechanism without throttling. If your thermal budget is 9 (8 + 2*1/2), and you operate normally with a thermal budget of ~5, you can temporarily go to 9 without any noticeable difference in actual performance, or heat, or cooling. In another sense, they’re probably leaving a lot of performance potential on the table to achieve that perception. As far as which cores are demoted… I definitely don’t know enough to speculate. If favoring the same set would affect longevity of the device, they’d rotate. If not it’s simpler not to do that. I have no idea which is more likely.