I thought about that for a hot minute before making the analogy and in previous years I would have agreed. The cores are doing the work, after all. But CPUs nowadays are so different nowadays compared to yesteryear.
In one CPU you have cores of different sizes and different speeds, and there are various ways to connect them to each other, and interplay with cache subsystems etc.
Anyways it doesn't matter. If I put in a certain number of watts and money and get a certain performance out, what does it matter how?
(It's not like I when I had to buy 8 sparkplugs for my V8 engine instead of 4 sparkplugs for my straigt 4 engine when doing service.)
> In one CPU you have cores of different sizes and different speeds
In this case yeah, but not all of them. I believe AMD still makes some desktop CPUs without those compromises, but they're still slowly starting to put out CPUs like the 7950X3D that have crippled cache on certain cores (7950X does not, 7800X3D does not).
Of course big.LITTLE has been a thing in ARM for decades, including ASi. But I believe Intel started doing E-cores because they were starting to run into space and thermal constraints, and now AMD is exploring heterogeneous architectures as well. I hope they won't repeat the same mistakes.
In one CPU you have cores of different sizes and different speeds, and there are various ways to connect them to each other, and interplay with cache subsystems etc.
Anyways it doesn't matter. If I put in a certain number of watts and money and get a certain performance out, what does it matter how?
(It's not like I when I had to buy 8 sparkplugs for my V8 engine instead of 4 sparkplugs for my straigt 4 engine when doing service.)