This is how badly Intel screwed itself over

[igor_kavinski]

Instead of spying, if the OS instead kept track of the computing needs of the various processes and how loaded each core was, it could automatically schedule the most compute intensive threads to the most powerful and most under-utilized cores first. Intel Thread Director also makes things unnecessarily complicated because it prefers the Lion Cove cores for most foreground active tasks while hinting to the Windows scheduler to mostly run background tasks on the Skymonts, leading to them just sitting around with a bunch of non-critical processes during gaming.

 

[Brian_B]

My M1 Macbook Air actually beats my hot as heck and power hungry 12700K in the overclock.net Excel benchmark but I mainly use it for watching movies. Can't get used to the MacOS way of doing things. If Apple ever decides to kill the x86 market, they just need to strike a deal with Microsoft, paying them royalties for Windows ARM copies and then people start switching in droves. A fanless, noise-free computing experience is just super special and especially when it offers desktop level performance. Only Windows ARM availability/compatibility and pricing are the main hindrance to that dream.

I have to say, as a long time Mac OS user myself - I don't think you are wrong.

MacOS isn't exactly trending in a great direction. Most of the time I use my Macbook - it's either Excel and email, and increasingly just CLI unix tools.

The ARM macbooks are excellent hardware, but MacOS (well, Apple software in general) is just going in the wrong direction.

(that said, I wouldn't exactly say Windows is any better from a user experience, it just has the benefit of compatibility with 98% of software available)

 

[igor_kavinski]

but MacOS (well, Apple software in general) is just going in the wrong direction.

MacOS has some crazy behavior. I have to be ABSOLUTELY sure to eject a removable device otherwise next time I plug in, it won't get mounted. First few times this happened, I couldn't understand why. Then I looked in the Mac Task Manager and saw that it was running fsck on it. Since my USB flash drive has thousands of files, it takes at least five minutes for it to finish. And during that time, there is zero indication that the drive is being scanned. A simple notification like Windows displays "This drive was not safely removed. Do you want to scan it? Yes/No" would seem like the logical thing to do but Mac engineers think it's more logical to force the user to be scared of unsafely unplugging a removable device.

 

[Tyler-98-W68]

The average user has no idea what E-cores are or what process lasso does or what process affinity means. Now if Intel had gone out of their way to get all the game studios to release patches for their game engines to support their CPUs properly, things might have been better. But that's a gargantuan task as the game engine will need to query the number of available E-cores and then decide which thread to peg on which type of core. Most PC users want things to just work. I don't deny that Arrow Lake is fun to mess around with but average joe doesn't care about that.

I don't really care how stupid or smart the average consumer is, where was i talking about consumers? I was simply showing that e-cores are not a waste of space, instead of just talking about things I tested it out. There is no tweaking of that particular game engine, it eats multiple cores for breakfast no matter what the configuration.

 

[igor_kavinski]

There is no tweaking of that particular game engine, it eats multiple cores for breakfast no matter what the configuration.

Sadly, most game engines are not like that. There's no denying that the Skymonts are nice when you have a lot of them. Still, Intel couldn't put more of them in Arrow Lake due to the bigger size of Lion Cove cores and it bewilders me why they don't have 4P+24E or even 2P+32E SKUs. Would have been nice consumer level Intel mini-Threadrippers. They also don't overclock well which is a bummer. Let's hope that the Darkmonts in Nova Lake can do 5.5 GHz.

 

[Grimlakin]

I don't really care how stupid or smart the average consumer is, where was i talking about consumers? I was simply showing that e-cores are not a waste of space, instead of just talking about things I tested it out. There is no tweaking of that particular game engine, it eats multiple cores for breakfast no matter what the configuration.

I'm pretty sure the point was. Yea the e-cores are great. It's really too bad that consumers don't know or don't care largely about the number or types of cores they just want more and faster all the time regardless. So engineering be that software or hardware has to step up their game so consumer (and prosumer) software takes advantage of the cores appropriately and it feels like the OS's we run are still 5 years from being able to do that.

So please Tyler calm down... you're right... the E cores are awesome. Just like having CCD's with better cache and those without SHOULD be awesome for systems as well. There are technological hurdles for these shining in their best light across the board that have not been cleared as of yet. That's all.

No offense but he wasn't trying to change the game or win an internet argument. This forum is largely about discussions not trying to prove people wrong. Yea some threads go that way... but it's like you're trying to make it happen in this thread without cause.

 

[LazyGamer]

I mean, I love the E-cores. They're grunts, they get work done!

An all-E-core desktop SKU with gobs of cache would be a monster for sure.