Told you this had to happen, cant have x3d go against intels mainstream for the long run.

Late to the party as with Nvidia? Too bad - I hate big/small architecture.

Performance per dollar and platform cost will be better.

Wonder how different it will be from intel's approach, but yeah a major change is needed.

CPU Market: "Always two, there are. No more. No less. A Master and an apprentice."

barbacot:

Late to the party as with Nvidia? Too bad - I hate big/small architecture.

I also dislike big/little setups for desktops.

I would like to see 6/8 big cores and the same amount of little cores. Wondering if GPUs will ultimately head this way as well.

H83:

I also dislike big/little setups for desktops.

Yeah, just recently I had a "showdown" at work with a 13900k and vmware - a virtualized windows 7 ran like s**t, after discussions with vmware support turned out they have " a problem" with Intel cpu's since alder lake, not really fixed in latest version so I needed to provide admin access to vmware, disable memory integrity on core isolation, disable from powershell power optimization (the great big/little thing...) for vmware...now it runs acceptable - not like at home on my 5950X but acceptable... It may be of use for smartphones but get your little hands form our big pc's! Give me only big, full power and give me all of it! 😎

I also dislike it. I would rather see amd pushing more cores and more cache next generation.

This might be great for mobile devices, but what's the point for desktops when a 16c/32t chip isn't fully utilized by a game? Single core speed is still king unfortunately, they should work in auto work parallelization so software utilizes cores more efficiently. Laptops, tablets and phones all benefit from efficiency and every watt counts to keep them going. But for desktops, +/-10W make no difference (figuratively speaking).

Single core speed is only king if you have a thread that will completely max out a core, for the rest then low power cores are a better use of silicon as they are more efficient (both in size and power usage). So in reality you need enough high power cores for whatever you are running (6-8) and the rest are better being lower power ones. The only reason to not have low power cores is for software that can't work out how to use high power vs low power cores, but as Intel have made this standard for the last few years that should no longer be such an issue, although there will be the odd exception.

barbacot:

Late to the party as with Nvidia? Too bad - I hate big/small architecture.

For professional use cases I get it but gaming these will blow an all-big core design away simply because you can have even larger big cores to increases single threaded IPC.

Dribble:

Single core speed is only king if you have a thread that will completely max out a core, for the rest then low power cores are a better use of silicon as they are more efficient (both in size and power usage). So in reality you need enough high power cores for whatever you are running (6-8) and the rest are better being lower power ones. The only reason to not have low power cores is for software that can't work out how to use high power vs low power cores, but as Intel have made this standard for the last few years that should no longer be such an issue, although there will be the odd exception.

It is based on perception: my other passion besides computers is cars - specifically car tuning/modifications. I have a BMW 3 series coupe that I tuned the s**t out of it with high capacity injectors, custom turbo, custom intercooler and stage II tuning chip - sometimes my wife says that I love that car more than I love her and I don't know man, maybe? Now it has 470 HP on engine test stand. Do I need 470 HP in the city or outside with all the speed limits, restrictions and so on? - No, but I love it - the sound, the tremble starting from stand still, knowing that I have that power under the hood... The same with pc's - let me decide what I need or not, let me have 64 big cores that oozes of power even without using them - I want them! Going from all big cores to big/little is like going from young and restless to married with children - all the fun is gone!:D

E-cores in a desktop are perfectly fine so long as they're done right. If E-cores are substituting P-cores, that's a problem. So for example, if a 8600X were to have 4 P-cores and 4 E-cores, that's a reason to complain. If you don't lose any P-cores then great - we're basically getting free extra performance. If an 8600 non-X came with 4 P-cores and perhaps 8 E-cores, I think that would also be acceptable, since such a CPU isn't expected to do any heavy loads. Of course, this is assuming the scheduler is smart enough, but Intel and Qualcomm at this point have had a lot of time to get the Windows scheduler to catch up with asymmetric core configurations. E-cores do serve a good purpose in desktop CPUs. If you really "need" that many P-cores, then you probably shouldn't be using a mainstream socket in the first place. In other words, if you're groaning about losing a couple P cores to a bunch of E-cores and think that's making a noteworthy dent in your workload, there's a good chance you should've been spending a lot more money on a lot more cores in the first place.

moab600:

Wonder how different it will be from intel's approach, but yeah a major change is needed.

I'm also wondering this, because AMD's "P-cores" are (to my understanding) already a lot smaller than Intel's, and their chiplet design allows for relatively cheap production. I'm not sure how much smaller they really need to make things.

barbacot:

Yeah, just recently I had a "showdown" at work with a 13900k and vmware - a virtualized windows 7 ran like s**t, after discussions with vmware support turned out they have " a problem" with Intel cpu's since alder lake, not really fixed in latest version so I needed to provide admin access to vmware, disable memory integrity on core isolation, disable from powershell power optimization (the great big/little thing...) for vmware...now it runs acceptable - not like at home on my 5950X but acceptable... It may be of use for smartphones but get your little hands form our big pc's! Give me only big, full power and give me all of it! 😎

Thanks for the VMware tip.

barbacot:

It is based on perception: my other passion besides computers is cars - specifically car tuning/modifications. I have a BMW 3 series coupe that I tuned the s**t out of it with high capacity injectors, custom turbo, custom intercooler and stage II tuning chip - sometimes my wife says that I love that car more than I love her and I don't know man, maybe? Now it has 470 HP on engine test stand. Do I need 470 HP in the city or outside with all the speed limits, restrictions and so on? - No, but I love it - the sound, the tremble starting from stand still, knowing that I have that power under the hood... The same with pc's - let me decide what I need or not, let me have 64 big cores that oozes of power even without using them - I want them! Going from all big cores to big/little is like going from young and restless to married with children - all the fun is gone!:D

I would rather have a Prius than car with big ass ICE

barbacot:

It is based on perception: my other passion besides computers is cars - specifically car tuning/modifications. I have a BMW 3 series coupe that I tuned the s**t out of it with high capacity injectors, custom turbo, custom intercooler and stage II tuning chip - sometimes my wife says that I love that car more than I love her and I don't know man, maybe? Now it has 470 HP on engine test stand. Do I need 470 HP in the city or outside with all the speed limits, restrictions and so on? - No, but I love it - the sound, the tremble starting from stand still, knowing that I have that power under the hood... The same with pc's - let me decide what I need or not, let me have 64 big cores that oozes of power even without using them - I want them! Going from all big cores to big/little is like going from young and restless to married with children - all the fun is gone!:D

Not a great analogy - a car engine is basically doing one thing which is turning the wheels. All it needs is one huge P core. If you bought a PC with one very fast core it would be terrible as a computer can do tasks in parallel, so it can use multiple cores at the same time, and the limitations of design mean lots of smaller cores have a total processing power many multiples greater then the same amount of silcon and power dedicated to making one super core. Hence to tune it for speed like you did your BMW (across a variety of applications) a mixture of P and E cores is the best.

NO THANK YOU. Intel already did a disaster with AVX-512 (well, actually intel did multiple disasters with AVX-512.. 1 is just the big.little bullshit). On desktop nobody cares spare 1w less in idle. Biggest consumptions are others. On server side performance:watt are already winners. They should work instead on lowering MC latency and power.

Krizby:

I would rather have a Prius than car with big ass ICE

Don't tell me you're a treehugger... 😳

Dribble:

Not a great analogy - a car engine is basically doing one thing which is turning the wheels. All it needs is one huge P core. If you bought a PC with one very fast core it would be terrible as a computer can do tasks in parallel, so it can use multiple cores at the same time, and the limitations of design mean lots of smaller cores have a total processing power many multiples greater then the same amount of silcon and power dedicated to making one super core. Hence to tune it for speed like you did your BMW (across a variety of applications) a mixture of P and E cores is the best.

Basically yes, maybe not the greatest analogy - more like how I view things. Anyway if this is the case I think that I will buy a 7950X (not 3D) just for being a piece of history - last full power multi core consumer CPU.

The issue with big / little architectures always was, is, and will be core parking and too aggressive power savings. THAT's why I don't want it, because I can already see that they will need multiple microcode / scheduler / bios updates until it works. And honestly, for the prices we pay, that's even worse, we're supposed to just use the hardware we buy.