Comment on Leaks confirm low takeup for Windows 11
mightyfoolish@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Windows 11 was mostly released to take advantage of Intel’s split of CPU cores into efficiency and performance cores (E and P cores). If you don’t care about these E-cores or don’t have them, Windows 11 looks like just a small UI change at first glance.
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 1 year ago
What if any advantage does the P/E cores have when weighed against the bloat? It can’t be power related as those CPUs last time I checked still hogs.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 year ago
On a desktop system? Cost to manufacture. Simpler cores are more space-efficient per IPS (instructions per second) and thus you can squeeze more IPS on a given area of die and die area is money.
In areas where you care about power and heat budget (mobile, datacenter-scale servers) you also get advantages in those terms. What you lose is the sheer single-thread speed of the beefy CPU cores, but then not everything needs to be that fast. Small cores also keep random small loads off the beefy cores (say: move the mouse pointer) meaning that those don’t have to context-switch that often meaning the get to run more instead of waiting for data.
It definitely makes sense to have a couple of them around though they’re not going to make or break a CPU, at least not on the desktop. ARM processors have been using that scheme for ages (called big.LITTLE), hardly surprising seeing as practically everything mobile runs ARM. Also Linux had scheduling support for those kinds of architectures for ages, MS definitely didn’t have to roll out a whole new OS version for that.
Fun side note: AMD’s mini Zen 4 cores are in a sense the exact same cores as their usual Zen 4 cores: They have the same gate layout. What they do is pack them differently (and giving them half the L3 cache), achieving only ~3GHz instead of the full 5.5GHz for the full cores, but fitting two mini cores into the same area as one big core.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Isn’t 11 like less bloaty than 10? I’ve not noticed that much bloat compared to when I originally installed 10
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 1 year ago
They are both bad but 11 has a lot more crap running at all times.
mightyfoolish@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Honestly, I don’t know. It was supposed to be power management but for all know, it could all be marketing nonsense.