This of course backfires once people realize it doesn't matter if you have 64 cores when most of them run like crap and cause you to have to constantly self-manage whitelisting processes to run only on performance cores.
I'd rather have fewer cores of all the same higher performance that don't cause a hassle.
That's not even close to an accurate description of Intel's E cores. They have the same performance per clock as the Skylake cores they shipped in all their desktop processors from 2015 until just three years ago, and the E cores run at similar speeds. They may be descended from Intel Atom, but they're not crap.
The general idea of the E cores is sound: for tasks that can scale to more than a handful of threads, the E cores provide better performance per mm^2 of silicon and better performance per Watt. Going beyond the current 6-8 P cores in a consumer processor makes no sense; extra silicon budget should be spent on more E cores (and maybe more cache per E core).
Intel "E" cores are about 30% as big as the normal ones.
AMD avoids the scheduling issues, but does not get the density benefits.
When I can get a CPU which is all P-cores and has significantly more cores than even the biggest P + E hybrid CPU then what's the point? But if they could give me, say, a hybrid CPU with double the number of cores compared to the biggest available P-only CPU - now we're talking! Alas, the market for such a thing is probably not big enough to be economical.
Though I don't have experiencing using these CPUs so I don't know how well management of processes is implemented (probably only going to improve from now though).
Sure, marketing might play a bit into it. Less savvy buyers might make the mistake of comparing core counts across different brands / architectures rather than checking benchmark comparisons. Makes me think of the class action that happened with the Bulldozer architecture [3]. As long as they advertise the cores as distinct P and E cores, I think it is fair enough.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-12900k-an...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldozer_(microarchitecture)#...
It's a bit inconvenient that all cores are not identical, especially in real-time applications such as video games. Some schedulers may also not be able to use them well automatically. But if you care mostly about throughput, E-cores are superior to P-cores.
The case where you have many lower workload tasks or system processes, and a few high workload tasks.
This allows for maximizing throughput for the majority of users, while also optimizing for silicon usage and power draw.
Perhaps for your use cases, E cores don’t benefit you, but there’s been over a decade of proof of the use of heterogenous cores across mobile, laptops and now desktops.
E cores are meant to make a much milder tradeoff of performance and features than would be required to jam that many computing units into that area.