Intel’s Gracemont Small Core Eclipses Last-Gen Big Core Performance

Assuming those numbers were done with 4MB L2 Cache and not the 2MB version. And Depending on which Skylake Core variant they were comparing against, a Quad Core Gracemont is anywhere from 8mm2 to 13mm2. For comparison an ARM Quad Core N1 on TSMC 7nm is about 5.6mm2. Both inclusive of L2 Cache.

I actually want to see a 64 or even a 128 Core version to be used on Server. Or a cheap $10 x86 SoC for NAS and other applications.

It seems like right now, we're interrupting the cores every few tens to hundreds of milliseconds. Even if the scheduler says "Okay, nothing else worth running, resume what you're doing", you've still burned precious cache and branch predictor space.

If we knew that most of the "interactive" stuff that had to be snappy-- the OS, your UI threads, and any other tasks, were tossed on other "little" cores, you could reserve a "big" core with more "cooperative multitasking" semantics-- you'd only have to only yield to the scheduler when you're ready. Maybe add a (comparatively) very long watchdog to (maybe 30 seconds or a few minutes) to protect against someone reserving a core and promptly crashing. Then you can have a light-weight "pet the watchdog" operation instead of a full context switch run through the scheduler.

Is it a pentium m/core save out of the pentium 4 moment? Is there a plan to put more of those small cores together? I mean I'd be pretty interested in a 256 core machine with 'only' skylake per-core performance...