[polishTar]

Interesting read.

I wonder what went into the decision on the ratio of P to E cores. Naively it seems like more of the die space should be dedicated to E cores since they're so killer for workloads where efficiency or throughput matter. Obviously some jobs can't spread the load across multiple threads and are sensitive to single-threaded latency, but those workloads won't benefit from so many P cores anyways.

[masklinn]

There’s only so many background / non-interactive tasks you need to run, and especially that you need to run now: with more Es you increase the parallelism but if everything goes idle quickly you’ve kinda wasted the silicon.

P cores are more relevant for interactive work which the user is waiting on, hence he sacrifice if efficiency.

[thfuran]

But there's a far more limited amount of interactive tasks that you need to run right now at the highest speed.

[masklinn]

However when there are interactive tasks to run, you need to run them now, because the user is waiting.

That is why I find Intel's core mix dubious. By definition background tasks are not generally time-critical, having more cores for them doesn't usually save me time, or money.