This is how badly Intel screwed itself over

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.
 
igor_kavinski said:
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.
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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)
 
Brian_B said:
but MacOS (well, Apple software in general) is just going in the wrong direction.
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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.
 
igor_kavinski said:
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.
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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.
 
Tyler-98-W68 said:
There is no tweaking of that particular game engine, it eats multiple cores for breakfast no matter what the configuration.
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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.
 
Tyler-98-W68 said:
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.
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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.
 
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.
 
www.intel.com

Compare Products

Compare Products
www.intel.com www.intel.com

Looking at that, you can see that Intel is LYING when it says that it doesn't want to compete with Strix Halo.

How?

96GB of LPDDR5x-9600

What do LLMs love? RAM bandwidth

What else do they love? GPUs aka matmul engines in disguise!

And just for kicks, they put a fat NPU on the package too!

So they reduced the CPU cache, can only clock it up to 5.1 GHz, removed HT to control heat output and couldn't sneak in AVX-512 because they just HAD to have the die space wasting NPU and the stupid iGPU that they didn't really need to put on the die because they have their own dGPU that they could've bundled with the CPU if they were that desperate to have ARC be available!!!
 
Are you aware how well the Arc B390 performs?

Are you aware how well the panther lake cpu's scale at lower clock speeds vs anything AMD has to offer?

Sounds like grasping at straws.
 
Tyler-98-W68 said:
Sounds like grasping at straws.
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Nope. I wanted desktop PTL to play with instead of ARL Refresh. This mobile PTL exists due to Intel's stupid focus on AI which has not paid off still.

If I had even 1% of the wealth of the average stupid person involved in Intel's mind bendingly lame decisions, I would not have to work another day. This is a great reason why Intel is so much worse off. They paid too much to criminally smart and dishonest employees making grand promises.

Here's the latest on Intel's troubles: https://www.semiaccurate.com/2026/01/28/intel-is-in-a-serious-bind-with-few-options/
 
First day hating on intel? Not the first time they release a mobile platform before a desktop platform. Not sure why that's such a big deal. Surely you remember the intel core platform that was mobile first and gave the pentium 4s run for the money before the desktop platform was released?

In fact the A-Open i975xa-YDG was a super popular atx board that ran mobile Cpus. At the time building one of the mobile cpus in that board often gave better performance than the P4s and A64s of the time period (2006).
 
Tyler-98-W68 said:
Surely you remember the intel core platform that was mobile first and gave the pentium 4s run for the money before the desktop platform was released?
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That's a totally different story coz the architectures were VASTLY different. But I still favored the P4 because it had potential to hit past 7 GHz especially with future process technologies. I deeply mourn the shelving of the Tejas prototype :(

I wish they had continued their P4 experiment along side the Core CPUs. Maybe then they would have had something to fight with. The Pentium 4 was a beast with non-branchy code especially media encoding.
 
Something positive for a change: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16384893?baseline=16074724

That's 290K @ 6800 MT/s against the 9950X3D2.

With 8200 or higher RAM, results should improve considerably.

This is the 290K vs. an experienced tweaker's 285K: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16384893?baseline=9840756

They definitely changed something in 290K coz despite losing in many MT tests against the tuned 285K, it is still coming out ahead considerably in a few MT tests even with slower RAM speed.

Tyler, do you mind sharing your GB6 285K result for comparing the 290K against?
 
I was just checking one of my rarely used email inboxes. I had sent an email to this assembly language and computer architecture expert (he's been employed by the big players) and he replied more than 18 months later so I had missed that email and just found it now.

So, unfortunately because I would not want to lose the privilege of hearing his expert thoughts in the future, I cannot reveal who he is. But his thoughts were very intriguing.

He calls Alder Lake's performance increase "stunning" compared to Rocket Lake. Since he has his own suite of assembly based benchmarks to poke around the innards of CPUs, he found that AMD used some magic sauce in Zen 3 which was then "copied" by Intel in Alder Lake but done better than AMD so Alder Lake is able to beat Zen 3 in many cases. However, he hated the power consumption of Alder Lake and had to put it in the basement where it's cold and then remote into it.

I have asked him about Arrow Lake. Let's see if he replies.
 
igor_kavinski said:
He calls Alder Lake's performance increase "stunning" compared to Rocket Lake.
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It really was though. Rocket Lake was a minor bump - the best Intel could do on their aged 14nm+(++++++++) process. It wasn't at all a bad CPU, quite the contrary, it just wasn't the bump above the various Skylake iterations that came before that people were expecting. An eight-core Rocket Lake 11900K SKU simply didn't move the needle versus the previous 10-core Skylake-derived Comet Lake 10900K.

But Alder Lake? A step change in IPC. An eight-core Alder Lake with additional L3 cache would have been the fastest gaming CPU available and would still likely be faster than the recently-released 9850X3D.
 
I can't believe my luck! He replied and a VERY LONG reply at that, talking about his life etc.

Most of it is not tech relevant so I'll just relate his tech thoughts:

He got one of the Arrow Lake laptops. At the architecture level, he's impressed that it's a big leap over Alder Lake. Also, he has noticed that Intel engineers are trying to make up for the lack of AVX-512 by backporting some of the important instructions in an effort to at least have a kind of AVX-256 advantage against the competition. He has seen some software using the new instructions so maybe the strategy paid off a bit. Regarding Panther Lake, he is going to skip it just like he skipped Lunar Lake because for power efficiency, he would rather have ARM chips but he is looking forward to getting Nova Lake for AVX10. He doesn't lament the loss of hyperthreading and can't wait till there's only a unified core left.

He called Snapdragon Elite X the Pentium 4 of the ARM world :D

So he's not really impressed with any of the X2 hype and will believe it when he sees it. He actually had a smoother experience gaming on his Nvidia Spark box than his Apple M4 laptop so that bodes well for the upcoming N1X laptops.

LazyGamer said:
But Alder Lake? A step change in IPC. An eight-core Alder Lake with additional L3 cache would have been the fastest gaming CPU available and would still likely be faster than the recently-released 9850X3D.
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Yeah. Unfortunately, it seems Intel is in the habit of squandering their advantages. I'm sure they have engineers who would like to see things differently but when they mentally compare the cost of speaking up vs. losing their nice salary packages and other benefits, they probably decide to just shut up and ride the waves as long as they can.
 
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https://twitter.com/x/status/2018800984886268140

Threadripper alternative for the 1% rich. Unobtanium CPU for the rest of us.

www.techpowerup.com

Intel Launches Xeon 600 Series Workstation CPUs

After a long wait, Intel has launched its Xeon 600 Series processors dedicated to workstations. Codenamed Granite Rapids-WS, the new lineup is targeting single-socket workstations, with a strong emphasis on high core counts, large memory capacity, and extensive I/O for multi-GPU and...
www.techpowerup.com www.techpowerup.com

But hey, if anyone is slightly underwhelmed by their 245K, Intel has the solution!

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I'll believe it when they launch an enthusiast board for it... right now it looks like it's all workstation/server stuff
 
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