> Apart from some models of Alder Lake, it is now impossible to buy an Intel chip that does not have at least P (Performance) and E (Efficiency) cores.
The high-level pitch of P cores and E cores seems so elegant, but when it actually comes to scheduling, it gets messy fast. Even in a laptop running off a battery, you can't simply switch to E cores because some short-lived work might be latency-sensitive. You also can't assume long-running work should be on an E core because maybe you're anxious to get that video encoded. Even for lots of small work, different core can have different performance characteristics, and a P core might be more efficient for certain workloads.
Maybe its just me, but this P&E arch is underwhelming and screams similar issues AMD bulldozer again.
Claims of massive core counts with mediocre performance, and little control over how things are assigned to the cores.
Maybe that will improve over time with improved schedulers, but I doubt it. Its looks like an architectural issue.
The experience feels so inconstant, even ending up worse than the prior generations with all normal P cores with lower core counts.
I'm avoiding Intel P&E CPUs with anything that needs consistent performance, as my limited experience with the new Intel chips leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth, and a frustrating computing experience.
I see the heterogeneous architectures as mostly a plus. If you want the most throughput for a highly parallel workload given a power and silicon budget 100% E cores would be best. If you have some workloads that don't parallelize well then a few P cores are best. Heterogeneous gives possibilities to optimize for both cases. There is another knob to turn, and mistakes can be made, but this should be an overall positive.
My bigger concern with the newer Intel CPUs are the crashes and reliability issues that were reported.
7 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 34.3 ms ] threadReally? I just bought one:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236786/...
My bigger concern with the newer Intel CPUs are the crashes and reliability issues that were reported.