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> when most of them run like crap That's not even close to an accurate description of Intel's E cores. They have the same performance per clock as the Skylake
by wtallis 3y ago
> when most of them run like crap
That's not even close to an accurate description of Intel's E cores. They have the same performance per clock as the Skylake cores they shipped in all their desktop processors from 2015 until just three years ago, and the E cores run at similar speeds. They may be descended from Intel Atom, but they're not crap.
The general idea of the E cores is sound: for tasks that can scale to more than a handful of threads, the E cores provide better performance per mm^2 of silicon and better performance per Watt. Going beyond the current 6-8 P cores in a consumer processor makes no sense; extra silicon budget should be spent on more E cores (and maybe more cache per E core).
- kllrnohj 3y agoExcept as AMD is showing you can have both and not be at the mercy of hoping your OS's scheduler is able to consistently figure out what to do.
- wtallis 3y agoAMD's main advantage is that their P cores are much more reasonably-sized than Intel's P cores, so they don't need a heterogeneous solution as badly as Intel. But even so, AMD has an entry-level consumer chip that is heterogeneous, though not as severely as Intel's consumer chips.
- mmaniac 3y agoAMD has the advantage of Zen 4c being functionally the same as Zen 4 in every way except its frequency profile. The cache hierarchy and IPC between Phoenix 2's heterogeneous cores is identical. It's much easier to make scheduling decisions than on Intel.
- Dylan16807 3y agoAMD "c" cores are about 65% as big as the normal ones. Intel "E" cores are about 30% as big as the normal ones. AMD avoids the scheduling issues, but does not get the density benefits.
- yourusername 3y agoE core boost is limited to ~4 ghz on most models. Falling back to a ~2015 mid range CPU when your OS makes a scheduling error feels really bad and it is very noticeable.
- kouteiheika 3y agoI wish someone would release a CPU with a ton of E-cores, otherwise the idea makes no sense to me as a user of a workstation-class machine. When I can get a CPU which is all P-cores and has significantly more cores than even the biggest P + E hybrid CPU then what's the point? But if they could give me, say, a hybrid CPU with double the number of cores compared to the biggest available P-only CPU - now we're talking! Alas, the market for such a thing is probably not big enough to be economical.
- supertrope 3y agoThe power performance area tradeoff is 4 E cores fit in the space of one P core. Some newer laptops use Intel 2P+8E or 2P+4E.