Thursday, July 13th 2023
Intel Core i5-14600K an 8P+8E Processor, Core i3 6P+0E, Core-Counts of Other SKUs Surface
Intel is planning to aggressively step up CPU core counts of its 14th Gen Core "Raptor Lake Refresh" SKUs over the 13th Gen, to offer more value at given price-points, given that the IPC of these processors aren't seeing an increase, according to a report by RedGamingTech. We already reported that the 14th Gen Core i7 series, such as the i7-14700K, will come with a core-configuration of 8P+12E. It turns out that the Core i5-14600K will witness the first uplift in performance core-counts in over 4 years (since the i5-8600K). These chips will be 8P+8E, which entails 8 "Raptor Cove" Performance cores, and 8 "Gracemont" Efficiency cores. The i5-14600K is, for all intents and purposes, identical to the current Core i7-13700K, but with a touch lower maximum boost clocks, and more importantly, a lower price.
This doesn't mean that the entire 14th Gen Core i5 series has the same 8P+8E configuration. Intel has been sub-segmenting its Core i5 series for a few generations now, and the Core i5-14600K and i5-14600KF will be the only SKUs with 8P+8E. There will likely not be an "i5-14600" (non-K) SKU altogether, to avoid the kind of confusion that emerged between the 13th Gen i5-13600 and i5-13600K (lower L2 cache sizes for the non-K SKU). The Core i5-14500 and Core i5-14400 will be 6P+8E processors. It's likely that Intel will use the newer silicon that gives the P-cores of these two chips 2 MB of L2 cache per core instead of 1.25 MB, and their E-core clusters will each get 4 MB of L2 cache instead of 2 MB.
In a big move that's sure to shake up the entry-level, Intel is planning to give the 14th Gen Core i3 series a much needed core-count increase. These will be 6-core/12-thread processors—that's 6 P-cores, and zero E-cores. In essence, the 14th Gen Core i3 series will resemble the 12th Gen Core i5 non-K series processors that lacked E-cores, but which are still formidable for 1080p and 1440p gaming PC builds on a tight budget.
Lastly, in a piece of bad-ish news, the top-of-the-line 14th Gen Core i9 series will continue to be 8P+16E, just like the 13th Gen. Intel might try to dial up clock speeds of the Core i9-14900K a bit over that of the i9-13900K, but the company has already squeezed the most performance out of this die with the Limited Edition Core i9-13900KS, we doubt the i9-14900K will do any better.
Intel is expected to debut the 14th Gen Core "Raptor Lake Refresh" family in October 2023.
Sources:
RedGamingTech (YouTube), VideoCardz
This doesn't mean that the entire 14th Gen Core i5 series has the same 8P+8E configuration. Intel has been sub-segmenting its Core i5 series for a few generations now, and the Core i5-14600K and i5-14600KF will be the only SKUs with 8P+8E. There will likely not be an "i5-14600" (non-K) SKU altogether, to avoid the kind of confusion that emerged between the 13th Gen i5-13600 and i5-13600K (lower L2 cache sizes for the non-K SKU). The Core i5-14500 and Core i5-14400 will be 6P+8E processors. It's likely that Intel will use the newer silicon that gives the P-cores of these two chips 2 MB of L2 cache per core instead of 1.25 MB, and their E-core clusters will each get 4 MB of L2 cache instead of 2 MB.
Lastly, in a piece of bad-ish news, the top-of-the-line 14th Gen Core i9 series will continue to be 8P+16E, just like the 13th Gen. Intel might try to dial up clock speeds of the Core i9-14900K a bit over that of the i9-13900K, but the company has already squeezed the most performance out of this die with the Limited Edition Core i9-13900KS, we doubt the i9-14900K will do any better.
Intel is expected to debut the 14th Gen Core "Raptor Lake Refresh" family in October 2023.
79 Comments on Intel Core i5-14600K an 8P+8E Processor, Core i3 6P+0E, Core-Counts of Other SKUs Surface
By default cores are set to min 100% unparked (this is cores on normal CPUs like 9900k and AMD chips, and e-cores on hybrid CPUs), when using hybrid CPUs the default min unparked is set to 0% for p-cores.
Apps like games and benchmarks will unpark p-cores as well as various desktop apps. The preffered p-cores will always be the first to unpark, it isnt random. In addition logical cores can be parked independently, so e.g. cores stay HTT free until all p-cores are unparked and then the second logical core on each p-core will become available if the system needs it.
This is pretty cool as it leads to a lot of background processes and services utilising the e-cores freeing up p-core resources for CPU demanding interactive tasks.
This behaviour is configurable either via registry editing or using a tool like powersettingsexplorer (no spaces), I have e.g. set p-cores to min 10% unparked so the preferred p-cores are always unparked, you can choose to set it to 100% and it would have the behaviour you desired without disabling the e-cores, however I didnt personally do this because it increases vcore for lighter loads and as such reduces efficiency, and I noticed no interactive benefit.
These things that can be tinkered with are quite fascinating, but a very quick adjustment would be to simply adjust min p-core unparked %, set the heterogeneous scheduler to prefer p-cores and use something like process hacker (system informer) to save persistent affinity settings for things like browsers and svchost to e-cores.
If you like I can post a power policy with these two adjustments, based on high performance schema but with these two changes (min p-core unparked 100% and het* prefer p-cores).
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Additional note, I have yet to examine the default behaviour on Windows 11, so I dont know specifically if any of the above things I stated had their defaults changed, obviously aware of the intel thread director addition as mentioned in TPU's reviews.