I don't think the e-core approach is necessarily bad when you just a need a few more threads to do some gutter work while the p-cores chew their way through tougher tasks. I might eat my words later but for the moment this is my thought process. More people probably have umteen browser tabs open than ever before and Microsoft Office continues to get worse so more ecores can be useful outside a gaming context.
It seems to me 6 p-cores respond well to more juice (which Intels design can take) but 8 p-cores is on the verge of meltdown so going the 6 p-core++++++++ e-cores route makes sense until they can engineer their way into performance competitiveness more effectively without needing to push more power into their chips which AMD can't really do. Perhaps 14th gen is where 8-pcores are more feasible finally?
13th gen seems to be competitive I don't recall why e-cores are so controversial. I understand obviously it was to compete with AMD in core count and getting the upper hand in Cenebench scores. Early renditions were lackluster and Intel needed moar power to flex enough not to be completely outshined by Ryzen.
I'm willing to try an e-core cpu perhaps next year but a bit nervous what board to pick and how to tamp the power levels down to normal if the board is over juiced if nothing better so I can objectively compare the Intel vs. AMD experience for myself. Even the 12600/12700/12900 seems pretty respectable in terms of price/performance ratio at the moment although I'm more interested in trying a 13th gen chip.
So much complaints about e-cores I don't get why there aren't more complaints about duel chiplet Ryzens having the 2nd gimped chiplet instead of a separate sku that features two perfect chiplets.
You know what else gives a massive boost in performance, more P-cores. I guess I don’t get it. You can have 16 AMD P-cores with the same total performance as 8 Intel P-cores plus 16 Intel E-cores for less energy usage. Why go with the higher power, heterogeneous version other than brand loyalty?
I think to be fair 16 AMD p-cores are not the same. The 2nd chiplet of 8 cores tends to be weaker but you can kind of mitigate that with curve optimizer based on something I read recently.
