I may be way off here, but to me the transition to heterogeneous cores is more of a long term than short them play, anticipating the era where we'll have differ

I may be way off here, but to me the transition to heterogeneous cores is more of a long term than short them play, anticipating the era where we'll have different kinds of cores in our systems. Even the performance cores of today have circuitry that's there to make certain workloads faster (video decoding, crypto operations, etc.). Other stuff has mostly been offset to the GPUs (actual grahphics-related stuff, machine learning). In an architecture where you can mix/match different kinds of cores, it doesn't sound crazy to have cores that are specially designed for those tasks. Processors could ship with one "crypto-core", a "video-decoding-core", etc.. These should provide similar performance to full performance cores at _much_ lower cost, energy consumption and die area. If (and that's a big if) they can get to a point where: a) Designing/implementing new specific-purpose small cores is not outrageously expensive because the whole coordination/integration part is already solved b) They have a combination of cores that provides similar performance to current p-cores-only cpu's at similar processor cost and power budget. That would be a huge win for processor companies. They would be able to open lines of specialized processors commanding huge premiums for certain industries (think about processors with 128 ml-cores, 128 video-encoding-cores, etc.). Or maybe I'm just delusional :)