There's still 8P cores, so no the 20-80% load area is not suffering. > Also, having 8 efficiency cores is just silly, if you just want to run background tasks

There's still 8P cores, so no the 20-80% load area is not suffering. > Also, having 8 efficiency cores is just silly, if you just want to run background tasks with minimal power consumption, how do 8 cores lead to that? Who said efficient cores must only be for low power background tasks? These efficiency cores are small, very small, so Intel can pack a lot of them into the die. And they provide far far bigger returns on multithreaded workloads than SMT does. As in, given a choice between 2 more P cores (so 10P cores total) or these 8 E cores (so 8p+8e), it's a no brainer to go with the 8 E cores. You get larger multithreading returns with a similar die size cost. And the background power efficiency is just a freebie bonus.