Intel Expands 12th Gen Core to Ultraportable Laptops, from 5 to 14-cores | Hacker News Reader

Intel Expands 12th Gen Core to Ultraportable Laptops, from 5 to 14-cores

anandtech.com

15 pointsrbanffy14 comments

Can anyone comment on why intel has decided to go with relatively a large amount of E cores compared to P cores? One of the i3's even has 8 E cores and only 2 P cores. Apple seems to have taken the opposite approach with the M1 pro/max (8 P cores and 2 E cores), although I'm not even sure if the P/E designation are comparable between the two with how complicated CPU's are becoming.

That is the only way Intel can put up some half decent MT benchmark numbers without blowing out the die cost, since Intel’s P core is way too big and power hungry for the amount of performance it dishes out. On an ultraportable the power consumption is really unacceptable.

I would argue the M1 Pro/Max are targeted at much higher end workloads than an i3. Light workloads (web browsing, launching apps), don’t need many high performance cores, since they’re mostly single-threaded.

What is interesting is how intel has 4-8 e cores even on the high end.

M1 Pro should be compared to i7 or i9, not i3. The target customer for i3 are average consumers with fairly little need of Performance. The more E core make sense to improve system responsiveness on i3. Not to mention they are smaller in die area.

Something is weird here. The chart says the Core i3-1220P has 2 P cores and 8 E cores but then the article says "Bringing up the rear is the Core i3-1220P, which offers only two efficiency cores and eight performance cores." I'm not sure which one is correct.

The real comparison on the low end is the original M1 with 4P and 4E cores.

For the M1 Pro, Apple traded better power efficiency for doubling the frequency and saving a little die area.

Now all that is needed is a decent way to cool all that corefest, in a 9.x mm package. Somehow, that seems tricky. But perhaps it will be solved. Or not, and thermal throttling will continue to be the bane of laptops.

6 apples + 8 oranges = 14 "cores"

+8 pears. Oranges don't have cores!

5 ? Same story as for AMD X3 ? (disabling defective cores or market segmentation)

No, 1 performance + 4 efficiency cores. It feels like just adding up the count is a bit of a cheat though.

Haha. So just like on my work laptop. 1 core working and 3 sleeping (because of thermal throttling). Got to love marketing.

Nice, good old times Pentium is single core again Core i3 to i7 - all dual core But you have several atom cores so you can run your stuff on them, while windows update taking the main ones.

I would assume the E cores would be running things like Windows Update while you continue to work on mostly the P cores. A general rule is that interactive apps should be scheduled to the fastest cores.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com