Intel is back! An analysis in the next few years
E-Cores are love. E-Cores are life. As many of us know, Intel were the first to launch with a heterogenous x86 architecture. What this means is that there's more than just one type of core. Where every single core in a processor was designed identically, Alder Lake now has two types of cores (Similar to the big.LITTLE found in ARM-based mobile processors). The purpose of this is to maximize MultiThreaded (MT) performance for its die area. Intel's large cores (P-Cores) are extremely fast. However, they're also BIG. They take up a lot of die area, and adding more of them makes the chip bigger and more expensive to manufacture. The solution is add some small cores that aren't as fast, but are much faster relative to the space they take up. In the above image, we can see the BIG dark blue cores. Those are the P-cores, and the small light-blue E-cores have 4 cores in about the same die area as the P-cores. In reality a cluster of 4 E-cores are slightly wider than a P-core ...