I think if you say to OS and software vendors "here are a bunch of toy cores, do something useful with them", it finally justifies a nudge towards smarter sched

I think if you say to OS and software vendors "here are a bunch of toy cores, do something useful with them", it finally justifies a nudge towards smarter scheduling. With ordinary SMP, there's little reason not to just assign "first free core". I always envisioned a day where we'd have devote the small cores to "parasitic load" tasks-- your media player, Slack/Discord/etc., and a thousand OS maintenance threads. They might run at 95% load to do not very much, but it's no big deal-- the actual software you cared about now has the big cores to itself, and context switching (along with cache and branch-prediction losses) are reduced. I could even imagine getting to the point where tasks could requisition cores on a "no disruptions until actually yielded by the main process" basis for real-time or maximum performance tasks.