Nova Lake has something similar in the works with its bLLC (Big Last Level Cache), but that's still a hardware solution. The thought of up to 30% performance just waiting to be extracted through better software optimization is therefore not overstated. In a way, Hallock is pointing fingers at developers and engineers who have optimized for AMD's relatively conventional silicon first, which affects the true potential of Intel's hybrid architecture.
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Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he\u2019s not working, you\u2019ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-22/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Hassam Nasir Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
Gururu Writing better software to increase hardware performance is essentially cheating at Geekbench I think. Reply
Vanderlindemedia Reminds me of the FX Era. AMD launched a chip, that lacked single threading performance, but shined in multithreading. This was in a era where games where reliant on single core performance, making it a "bad" chip. I don't think a lot of people are or where waiting on hybrid cores. If i buy a CPU it needs to be all performance cores, nothing else. There's no trade-off with AMD products these days, as they are non of that hybrid stuff. Great that Intel finds 30% on the table, but the same story applied for AMD back then. Release a P core chip only. Reply
TerryLaze In a way, Hallock is pointing fingers at developers and engineers who have optimized for AMD's relatively conventional silicon first, which affects the true potential of Intel's hybrid architecture. That's not at all what he is pointing at or what's happening, he is blaming games being developed for console first and that means that even AMD desktop CPUs with more than 8 cores lose just as much if not even more performance than intel. Original article: Viele Titel würden zunächst für Konsolen entwickelt und optimiert und erst im Anschluss auf den PC übertragen. Diese Vorgehensweise könne dazu führen, dass PC-Versionen nicht vollständig auf die jeweilige Hardware abgestimmt sind. In der Folge bleibe ein Teil der möglichen Leistung ungenutzt. Hallock spricht in diesem Zusammenhang von Leistungsreserven im Bereich von 10 bis 30 Prozent, die ohne gezielte Software-Anpassung nicht erschlossen werden könnten. Reply
bit_user The phrase "up to" is doing a lot of work, here. The iBOT test found an average of only 8%, with some games experiencing less speedup and the greatest improvement being only 18%. On Cyberpunk 2077, the speedup was only 1.8%. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intels-binary-optimization-tool-tested-and-explained-how-the-ibot-translation-delivers-up-to-18-percent-faster-gaming-performance-8-percent-on-average The article said: AMD's solution to this problem has been rather simple: just add a lot of SRAM next to the cores, aka 3D V-cache, so that the CPU's L3 cache needs are met quickly, helping achieve higher FPS in games. If the issue is "the fact that that game was just not optimized for your CPU", then a larger L3 cache isn't directly addressing that problem. It's addressing an issue, but a complementary one. Consoles have higher memory latency and smaller L3 caches than standard desktop CPUs, so the X3D CPUs certainly aren't addressing a deficit of desktop CPUs, relative to their console counterparts. Reply
wussupi83 I was initially anti e-core. But after some testing I've come to appreciate them.. mostly. Except, interestingly in my testing the 285k can actually be a slower than the 265k in some tasks and disabling 4 or 8 E-Cores in the 285k improves performance. But, interestingly, disabling E-Cores entirely hurts performance. And this is not a heavy CPU usage thermal throttled tests doing this so it's not like 265k is just boosting higher. Reply
daworstplaya Honestly, not a fan of the whole hybrid big Little, e-Core architecture. Also not sure, why you need more than 2 e-cores on a CPU designed for gaming and heavy workloads. 1 e-Core to run the OS, the other to run some low level back ground tasks/apps. More e-cores is just a waste of space on the silicon that could've been used for more p-Cores. Reply
usertests daworstplaya said: Honestly, not a fan of the whole hybrid big Little, e-Core architecture. Also not sure, why you need more than 2 e-cores on a CPU designed for gaming and heavy workloads. 1 e-Core to run the OS, the other to run some low level back ground tasks/apps. More e-cores is just a waste of space on the silicon that could've been used for more p-Cores. If used properly, E-cores are the opposite of a waste of space. They give more multi-threaded performance than the same area of P-cores. For single-threaded performance or gaming, 6-8, or soon 16, should be more than enough P-cores. However, I suspect Intel will try to reverse course on E-cores eventually. More cores/threads than ~52 won't help the typical consumer. If they can get cores to subdivide and combine into "super cores" as needed, that could be helpful. We may be seeing the groundwork for that in Nova Lake: Intel will apparently move from 3 MiB L2 cache for P-cores (Arrow Lake), to 4 MiB L2 cache shared between 2 P-cores (Nova Lake). LPE-cores will be around forever, actually filling the "background task" role and offering true efficiency benefits, often on a separate tile, instead of increasing multi-threading performance like E-cores. Reply
bit_user daworstplaya said: not sure, why you need more than 2 e-cores on a CPU designed for gaming and heavy workloads. 1 e-Core to run the OS, the other to run some low level back ground tasks/apps. Some people talk about these classes of cores as "latency cores" and "throughput cores", rather than P and E. That's because the main advantage of P-cores is that they can provide low-latency computation, but at a high cost in die area and energy. Therefore, the best use of them is to run only the most latency-sensitive threads on them. daworstplaya said: More e-cores is just a waste of space on the silicon that could've been used for more p-Cores. The E-cores provide more computation per area and more computation per Watt. So, if you have some workload that divides well among a lot of threads, the way to maximize throughput is actually to spend most of your silicon budget on E-cores. If anything, Intel's current designs are too P-core biased. However, that's assuming software was optimally designed to harness E-cores, which it's not. So, we're stuck with a compromise that's still not maximizing throughput. Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-vp-claims-up-to-30-percent-of-cpu-performance-is-untapped-by-modern-games-software-optimization-is-critical-to-unlocking-full-potential-of-hybrid-cpus#main
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