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> E-Cores are turned off in the BIOS, because setting affinity to P-Cores caused massive stuttering in Call of Duty. I understand doing this for the purpose of

• pjmlp 1y ago
  I think many haven't yet grasped the future is heterogeneous computing, especially, when many desktops are actually laptops nowadays. Software working poorly in such setup means no effort was made to actually make it perform well in first place. Games requiring desktop cases looking like a rainbow aquarium with top everything will become a niche, in today's mobile computing world, and with diminishing sales and attention spans, maybe that isn't the way to keep studios going.
  • jama211 1y ago
    Not “no effort to make sure it performs well in the first place”, that isn’t fair. Lots of effort probably went into it performing well, just this case isn’t handled yet and to be fair this only impacts some people currently and there is a chance to update it. This just reads like “if they haven’t handled this specific case they’ve made no effort at all across the board” which seems extreme.
    • pjmlp 1y ago
      Then why taking the effort to look better that it actually is?
      • mort96 1y ago
        Are you asking why the author of this article is disabling e-cores? That'd be because this article is trying to analyze Intel's Lion Cove cores. The e-cores and issues caused by heterogeneous cores are therefore irrelevant, only the P-cores are Lion Cove.
      • jama211 1y ago
        Ok I’m lost
  • raverbashing 1y ago
    Which is funny because the pushback the PS3 got from developers was too much. Maybe it was "too heterogeneous" But I guess the future was already set.
    • pjmlp 1y ago
      When Cell came to be, heterogeneous computing was mostly a HPC thing, and having the compute units only programmable in Assembly (you could use C, but really not), didn't help. Now every mobile device, meaning any form of computing on the go, has multiple performance/low power CPU cores, a GPU, programble audio, NUMA, and maybe even a NPU.
      • CoastalCoder 1y ago
        I did some programming for the Cell, and it definitely wasn't in assembly. It did require using intrinsics though, so I guess it was a little assembly-like.
        • pjmlp 1y ago
          I did mention C was supported, though if you really wanted to push them to the limit, and given the limited memory as well, Assembly was the way to go.
          • CoastalCoder 1y ago
            Fair. At the time I packed the necessary understanding to know of the GCC-emitted object code was significantly suboptimal.
            • CoastalCoder 1y ago
              s/packed/lacked/
    • saati 1y ago
      That was very different, here the problem is the game's threads get scheduled on the weak E-cores and it doesn't like that for some reasons, with the PS3 that would have been impossible, SPEs had a different ISA, and didn't even have direct access to memory, the problem was developers had to write very different code for the SPEs to unlock most of the performance of the Cell.
  • flohofwoe 1y ago
    > Software working poorly in such setup means no effort was made to actually make it perform well in first place. How do you optimize for a system architecture that doesn't exist yet? (e.g. CoD could probably be fixed quite easily, but you can't do that before the hardware where that problem manifests even exists - I'd say it's much more likely that the problem is in the Windows scheduler though) > Games requiring desktop cases looking like a rainbow aquarium with top everything will become a niche PC gaming has been declared dead ever since the late 90s ;)
    • pjmlp 1y ago
      Laptops are PC gaming, the only ones declaring them dead are the console generation that never played 8 and 16 bit home computers. For a game that gets yearly releases, I guess a decade would be long enough, given the existence of heterogeneous core programming across consoles and desktop systems.
      • mathiaspoint 1y ago
        Is windows even usable on laptops still? Between the waking from sleep to check notifications and the intensity of all the new background tasks it likely isn't pleasant.
        • vel0city 1y ago
          > Is windows even usable on laptops still? Is Linux even usable on laptops still? I've got a number of machines that still seem to fail to wake from sleep on even most recent and common distros. Is Mac even usable on laptops still? I've had a lot of coworkers and friends with Macs still run into hot bag situations often. > Between the waking from sleep to check notifications Its rarely ever actually Windows that's causing the issue. Almost always crappy drivers and crappy hardware that causes the wake. Disabling allowing wake from sleep on whatever crappy hardware is causing the sleep problems is almost always the answer. I recently spent some time trying to figure out why my Lenovo Legion Go was waking from sleep. I could put it to sleep and it would almost always wake up within an hour. There's a nice utility in Windows to help analyze power patterns on the system called powercfg which will give you a good report with powercfg /sleepstudy . Turns out one of the USB4 controllers was using a stupid amount of power while asleep which would cause the system to wake. Disabling that USB4 controller to wake the system from sleep meant it wasn't even partially awake and thus stopped using so much power and would not cause the system to wake. Now the device has been asleep for many hours and hasn't woken up once unexpectedly. It also is getting less battery loss sitting on the desk asleep than it had previously.
  • gruturo 1y ago
    There's a giant pile of software - decades worth of it, literally - which was already written and released, much of it now unmaintained and/or closed source, where the effort you cite is not a possibility. By all means anything released in 2025 doesn't have that excuse - but I can't fault the authors of 15+ years old programs for not having a crystal ball and accounting for something which didn't exist at the time. Intel releasing something which behaves so poorly in that scenario is.... not really 100% fine in my eye. Maybe a big warning sticker on the box (performs poorly with pre-2024 software) would be justified. Thankfully workarounds exist. P.S. At least I would have expected them to work more closely with OS vendors and ensure their schedulers mitigate the problem, but nope, doesn't look like they did.
    • p_ing 1y ago
      AMD and Intel do work with Microsoft (and I'm sure provide code to the Linux scheduler) to optimize the NT scheduler appropriately. Sometimes it doesn't happen Day 1 which is only a problem for the consumers that notice.
      • SleepyMyroslav 1y ago
        Imagine going back when 12th gen was released and posting your post. Alas, nothing has improved in 5 generations of hardware that required complete PC rebuild each time since then. Buying intel for gaming is like a test for ignorance now. There might be a decade before any trust can be restored in the brand /imho.
        • p_ing 1y ago
          Not sure what you're talking about, NT/Linux are well aware of the P/e cores and how to schedule among them for these past handful of generations. I also moved to AMD (5800X3D) due X3D alone being a massive improvement for simulations. Intel is still better in the laptop space and just outright more available (though I'm Mac-only for day-to-day laptop usage).
          • 1y ago
  • dandellion 1y ago
    People have been making the same argument for more than a decade now, meanwhile PC gaming has only kept growing. If that was the case, why hasn't it happened yet?
    • pjmlp 1y ago
      PC gaming has been growing since MS-DOS 3.3, when I was playing Defender of the Crown, in case people haven't been paying attention. Especially in Europe where consoles were largely irrelevant during the 8 and 16 bit days.
    • Retric 1y ago
      It’s arguing desktop gaming is dying not PC gaming. Q4 2024 shipped 13.6 million desktops (down 1.8%) vs 53.2 million laptops up (6.8%). That trend of declining Desktops vs increasing laptops has been steady since 2010. There’s still plenty of desktops to justify major investments by gaming companies, but that’s not guaranteed long term.
      • izacus 1y ago
        That's a strange movement of a goal post, not to mention that using percentages conveniently hides whether PC Gaming as a whole is growing or shrinking. Hows your post related to anything here?
        • Retric 1y ago
          What moving the goalposts? They specifically talked about gaming desktops as a form factor which needs developer support. “Games requiring desktop cases looking like a rainbow aquarium with top everything will become a niche, in today's mobile computing world”
      • vel0city 1y ago
        That's just overall desktop and laptop sales though, right? So home multimedia desktop PCs could be falling off a cliff, business desktop PCs could be dropping, and gaming PCs could be growing a bit and the overall market of desktops could still be net down, right? The overall market doesn't give us enough resolution to determine the health of gaming PC sales IMO. There's too many other possible ways we get to that same number.
  • StillBored 1y ago
    Is it? No one has come close to solving the problem of optimizing software for multiple heterogeneous CPU's with differing micro-architectures when the scheduler is 'randomly' placing threads. There are various methods in linux/windows/etc which allow runtime selection of optimized paths, but they are all oriented around runtime selections (ex pick a foo variation based on X and keep it) made once, rather than on cpu/context switch. This means that one either uses a generic target and takes the ~1.5-2.5x perf hit, or one optimizes for a single core type and ignores the perf on the other cores. This is probably at least partially why the gaming IPC numbers are so poor. The games are optimized for a much older device. So a 1.5-2.5x perf difference is these days could be 5-10 years of performance uplifts being left on the table. Which is why AMD seems to be showing everyone a better path by simply using process optimizations and execution time optimization choices with the same zen cores. This gives them both area, and power optimized cores without having to do a lot of heavyweight scheduler/OS and application optimization. Especially for OS's like Linux which don't have strong foreground/background task signalling from a UI feeding the scheduler. In other words heterogeneous SMP cores using differing micro-architectures will likely be replaced with more homogeneous looking cores that have better fine grained power and process optimizations. Ex, cores with even wider power/performance ranges/dynamism will win out over the nearly impossible task of adding yet another set of variables to schedulers which are already NP-hard, and adding even finer grained optimized path selection logic which will further damage branch prediction + cache locality the two problems already limiting CPU performance.
    • dist-epoch 1y ago
      > Which is why AMD seems to be showing everyone a better path by simply using process optimizations and execution time optimization choices with the same zen cores. Funny you would say that, because AMD X3D CPUs have cores with 3D Cache, and cores without, and massive scheduling problems because of this.
      • StillBored 1y ago
        Which is just caching/locality asymmetries, knowledge of which has been at least partially integrated into schedulers for a couple decades now. It just goes to show how hard scheduling actually is. But also, you call it a 'massive' problem and its actually somewhat small in comparison to what can happen with vastly different core types in the same machine. Many of those cores also have quite large cache differences too.
  • smolder 1y ago
    You can still buy and build (I do) powerful gaming-capable systems that do not emit rainbow-puke or have transparent panels and other gimmicky stuff like that.
  • amy214 1y ago
    >desktops are actually laptops nowadays. With concepts such as "chromebook" (semi-merging with android phones), apple convergence between iPhone and iComputer chipset and code, Samsung DeX (run samsung phone as a desktop), in my opinion the endpoint is: - Your phone is your desktop is your laptop. It may dock with a keyboard/monitor. This will happen when software kit is integrated between phone and computer (Microsoft has tried this in the past - too early), and the formfactor is sorted. Also a key gating item is phone CPUS matching laptop performance - Also some form of local AI will be present everywhere - Also, sadly, the way things our headed, such a system will be hardcore locked down if it inherits more from the phone ecosystem than the OS ecosystem
• giingyui 1y ago
  It’s a problem of compatibility of those games, not an issue with the processor. The kind of thing a game or windows update solves.
  • mcraiha 1y ago
    Old games won't get updates. That is why there are multiple separate tools that try to force the situation. e.g. Process Lasso
• xxs 1y ago
  > Real-world gaming results for these CPUs would be worse than what these results show. That's mostly an application and/or OS issue, not really a CPU one.
  • onli 1y ago
    Tell that to AMDs bulldozer. There is something to be said for considering theoretical performance, but one can't ignore how hardware works in practice, now.
• Havoc 1y ago
  Yeah intel either needs to ensure much better day 1 support for E / P core split or drop it entirely. People see them as an active negative right now rather than how intel pitches them
  • vladvasiliu 1y ago
    Is this a problem with Intel or with the OS scheduler? Haven't they had this kind of CPUs for a few years now, with this being touted as a reason to move from Win10 to 11?
    • dur-randir 1y ago
      It doesn't matter to the public's perception.
      • vladvasiliu 1y ago
        Right, it certainly doesn't. But since we're on a technical forum where my initial comment's parent seems to argue this issue is Intel's fault, I think it's interesting to determine whether that's actually the case. Of course, had Intel not released such a CPU, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But since they have released similar ones a few years ago now, is it still (only?) their fault?
        • p_ing 1y ago
          OS scheduler is responsible; AMD/Intel work with Microsoft on the NT scheduler and likely contribute code on the Linux scheduler.
  • masklinn 1y ago
    Scheduling is the OS’s decision not the CPU’s. Although Intel’s configurations are unhelpful to say the least: it’s hard to make good scheduling decisions when Intel sells a 2P, 8E, 2LE as a 12 cores to the user.
    • 1y ago
• smileybarry 1y ago
  It’s also a relatively “old” Call of Duty entry (2020-2021), in a series that famously ditched its older yearly entries quickly. The newer ones probably work fine with E-cores.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > I don't think many people would disable E-cores in BIOS if they bought this CPU, so for the purpose of deciding which CPU to buy, it would be more interesting to see results which factor in the potential software/scheduling issues which come from the E-core/P-core split. Every mainstream review includes the E-cores. It’s not interesting to continue to repeat that testing. The purpose of this article is an architectural exploration. Disabling the E-cores is a way to reveal that. If you’re looking for simple gaming benchmarks to decide which CPU to buy, this isn’t the site for it. There are countless outlets for generic gaming reviews. This site examines architectural details.
• barkingcat 1y ago
  Pretty sure the mainstream gaming advice is to turn off E-Cores so the vast majority of actual gamers would be doing just that.
• MangoToupe 1y ago
  I wonder if there's also something to do with how the window scheduler (or allocator, or driver interaction, or some system component—I just guessed the scheduler because it seems like the most likely thing to be different enough to drive this sort of phenomenon) approaches the task. I notice remarkably smoother gameplay with the same games under wine—even, confusingly, games developed in house at Microsoft like Flight Simulator—with the same hardware.
• MobiusHorizons 1y ago
  Yep, I don't think chipsandcheese is trying to write a review of the CPU for practical purposes. Their content is more on technical microachitechture minutiae. In pretty much all of their articles they work to isolate performance characteristics of subsystems to show the differences that can be attributed to just the changes in that system gen-on-gen or between manufacturers.
• bdavbdav 1y ago
  Frustrated with this in the Linux world too - trying to get proxmox to play nicely with P/E is a nightmare. The OS scheduler side of things is a PITA