Yes, while the big Intel cores are much bigger than the big AMD cores (e.g. 5 square mm in Meteor Lake vs. 3.8 square mm for Zen 4) the Intel small cores are mu

Yes, while the big Intel cores are much bigger than the big AMD cores (e.g. 5 square mm in Meteor Lake vs. 3.8 square mm for Zen 4) the Intel small cores are much smaller than the AMD compact cores (e.g. 1.5 square mm in Meteor Lake vs. 2.5 square mm for Zen 4c). The smaller size of the Intel E-cores is not only due to their different microarchitecture, but also because only their L1 cache memories are non-shared, while their L2 cache memories are shared within groups of 4 E-cores. The shared L2 cache may not matter much for many general-purpose programs, but for other multi-threaded programs, which depend on having a great total throughput for the transfers with the L2 cache, the performance of each group of 4 E-cores becomes similar to that of a single core, instead of being 4 times greater. The AMD compact cores have the same non-shared cache memories as the big cores. Only the shared L3 cache blocks that service a group of compact cores are smaller than for the same number of big cores.