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That's not the only factor at play. Many to most applications are dominated by single thread performance. JavaScript's interpreters are single threaded, for e

That's not the only factor at play. Many to most applications are dominated by single thread performance. JavaScript's interpreters are single threaded, for example. Something I don't often see, but it does come up here and there. One nice thing about the M1 is the performance is consistent as it doesn't have a massive auto-scaling boost involved. An Intel or AMD chip might start off at top speed single thread, but then something else spins up on another core, and you take a MHz hit on your primary thread to keep your TDP in spec. The background task goes away, and the MHz goes back up. Lots of performance jitter in practical use. Interconnects and IO also consume power. You can't just scale small e-core counts without also hitting power walls there too. All that said, I'd love to see some E-core only chips come out of intel targeted at thin clients and long battery life notebooks.

paulmd 5y ago
> All that said, I'd love to see some E-core only chips come out of intel targeted at thin clients and long battery life notebooks. they exist, that's called Atom. "e-core" is just a rebranding of Atom because the Atom brand is toxic with a huge segment of the tech public at this point, but Gracemont is an Atom core. There's no Gracemont-based SKUs yet, but Tremont-based Atoms exist (they're in one of the models of NUC iirc), which is the generation before. Also, the generation before that is Goldmont/Goldmont Plus which are in numerous devices - laptops, thin clients, and NUCs. Keep an eye on the Dell Wyse thin-client series, there are a lot of Goldmont-based units available if you can settle for a (low-priced surplus) predecessor.
- BackBlast 5y ago
  I have a Dell Wyse, I'm familiar with them. Intel has generally gimped Atoms. The 5070 is tolerable, but it would be nice to have better RAM capacity. Gracemont is such a huge departure from previous atom offerings I don't really consider them as having the same design goals. These new e-cores would be really nice for my use cases, better density and power efficiency than Ryzen. Maybe with AMD dragging their feet on the V2000 and V3000 lines of low power offerings, I can get these sooner...

paulmd 5y ago

> All that said, I'd love to see some E-core only chips come out of intel targeted at thin clients and long battery life notebooks. they exist, that's called Atom. "e-core" is just a rebranding of Atom because the Atom brand is toxic with a huge segment of the tech public at this point, but Gracemont is an Atom core. There's no Gracemont-based SKUs yet, but Tremont-based Atoms exist (they're in one of the models of NUC iirc), which is the generation before. Also, the generation before that is Goldmont/Goldmont Plus which are in numerous devices - laptops, thin clients, and NUCs. Keep an eye on the Dell Wyse thin-client series, there are a lot of Goldmont-based units available if you can settle for a (low-priced surplus) predecessor.

BackBlast 5y ago
I have a Dell Wyse, I'm familiar with them. Intel has generally gimped Atoms. The 5070 is tolerable, but it would be nice to have better RAM capacity. Gracemont is such a huge departure from previous atom offerings I don't really consider them as having the same design goals. These new e-cores would be really nice for my use cases, better density and power efficiency than Ryzen. Maybe with AMD dragging their feet on the V2000 and V3000 lines of low power offerings, I can get these sooner...