[marcyb5st]

Not having ever used one of these E/P mixed cores CPUs I am curious to know if they are painless to use (especially under Linux). Does it ever happen that processes that should run on E cores run on P cores or viceversa? Do you have to somehow specify affinity in executables or there's some black magic that figures out automatically?

Any insights in this regard would be greatly appreciated as I am in need to change my desktop and I'm really curious regarding these 13xxx CPUs.

[TkTech]

Intel contributed support which is in kernel versions 3.18 and up. Low priority tasks like the Baloo file indexer in KDE will always try to run on an E core.

You can also manually pin to cores in Linux and some platforms support manual management. When I'm traveling with my Pinebook pro I turn off the big cores which makes the battery last for days (when not watching video).

[marcyb5st]

Thanks for the explanation!

[nicolaslem]

These E/P cores were introduced by Intel with the 12th gen. When comparing modern laptops the 12th gen Intel models are at a real disadvantage compared to Ryzen 6000 (which has only normal P cores) in battery life tests.

My conclusion is that for now it is more of a gimmick than anything ground breaking.

[zamadatix]

I wouldn't say it's anything groundbreaking (phones have been doing this for 10 years now and Intel wasn't the first to introduce it to laptops/desktops the M1 was) but it's not a gimmick either. Intel 12th gen is just not a very efficient design and they lost their node advantage. Without efficiency cores the story would be just be "very bad" instead of "bad".

[marcyb5st]

Thanks for the comment. It is also my conclusion after reading around a bit.