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Interesting read.

I wonder what went into the decision on the ratio of P to E cores. Naively it seems like more of the die space should be dedicated to E cores since they're so killer for workloads where efficiency or throughput matter. Obviously some jobs can't spread the load across multiple threads and are sensitive to single-threaded latency, but those workloads won't benefit from so many P cores anyways.

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There’s only so many background / non-interactive tasks you need to run, and especially that you need to run now: with more Es you increase the parallelism but if everything goes idle quickly you’ve kinda wasted the silicon.

P cores are more relevant for interactive work which the user is waiting on, hence he sacrifice if efficiency.

But there's a far more limited amount of interactive tasks that you need to run right now at the highest speed.

However when there are interactive tasks to run, you need to run them now, because the user is waiting.

That is why I find Intel's core mix dubious. By definition background tasks are not generally time-critical, having more cores for them doesn't usually save me time, or money.

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