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Comment by dannyz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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