But that's the thing.
90% of consumers are NEVER going to understand a thing despite the absolute requirement for 'customer due diligence'. Its just straight up laziness or information overload / lack of time / attention, no amount of 'extra info' is going to fix this for people. Its up to the people themselves at some point. You can't cater to the bottom end of the (social) ladder. That's what commerce has been doing quite precisely and it doesn't help us in the slightest. They have as little understanding of the meaning of 12 cores versus 8+4, as they do about numbers of GB RAM, Megapixels, Speaker Watt RMS, etc etc etc. You will never, EVER, fix stupid. The way to do that is not better commerce, its
better education - something we seem to forget a lot lately. Education as in
school. Not reading 'best answer' posts on forums and google
Real education is aimed at making people 'capable' to teach themselves, to filter through the bullshit and distill the correct information. And to filter, to begin with.
Lacking that, in the end, what matters for consumers is the real world performance/characteristics of a product.
And in thát sense, we agree on many points don't get me wrong - maybe I misjudged your stance wrt 'lesser cores' and it being just an Intel thing. I think we both recognize it happens everywhere. I, too, only consider tangible progress, actual progress. Surely you've read my criticism elsewhere about products of either camp/color.
The point I'm trying to get across though is exactly what you called 'excitement in the news post'; it is that
we're in early adopter land when it comes to ADL and the purpose of bigLittle on desktop. Some say 'just give me P cores'. Others see the benefit of the higher core count as it
also frees up TDP budget for performance on single thread-oriented workloads. Newer iterations of Zen are likely to follow up on the approach too. DDR5 is going to open up additional bandwidth getting MSDT closer to HEDT performance (even if the bar moves up on that segment too, you do get access to more workstation-like capability in MSDT too) and that also opens up ways to use higher core counts for applications. Similarly, Zen also exceeds the 8 core 'limit' we long considered enough on MSDT. How is this not progress?
So the
question I presented against your stance, is that maybe its a bit too early to judge 'E cores' as half functional cores or 'lesser cores' altogether. You have no way of telling right now this approach is
not progress. And that's where the rose tinted glasses are: you pre empted bigLittle maturing on desktop x86 and being an actual advantage, but the performance numbers so far don't follow that argument at all. ADL performs quite well with or without them, even with a much lower TDP ceiling than that horrible PL2 241W limit. And that's in (small) part due to the presence of E-cores that increase efficiency opportunistically. The low hanging fruit in CPU land is gone. These are the baby steps we're going to be looking at apart from just 'more silicon', sadly, to make progress at all.
The other aspect you mention: commercial approach, is another aspect altogether, and in that one, we consumers do have the power. We just don't buy. If there is no progress there is absolutely no need to upgrade, so that problem fixes itself sooner rather than later. If the price for upgrading is not relative to the profit, a similar situation exists. Look at GPUs right now. You
can buy them at 2-3x the normal price. But people simply won't, there are limits. Have faith in those limitations, is my message for that, and also apply them to your own situation - something you also seem to do, very wisely.