What is meant by 6+8 cores?

Framework Laptop 13
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Hi there,

What is meant by 6+8 cores? Doesn’t each core have 2 threads?

Thanx,
Hari

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6 Performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. The performance cores have hyper-threading (2 threads) the efficiency cores do not. so that would be a total of 20 threads.

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The P-Cores are just iterations on the previous cores. So faster than 11th gen and also faster than AMDs current cores (if you ignore power consumption).

The Efficiency cores are much slower (compared to the P-Cores), so should not be compared directly to other up-to-date cores. It depends on what you are running how fast they are. I would roughly put them at ~50% the performance of 1 P-Core, but like I said this is very much an over generalization, which is not true for all use cases (like gaming).

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marginally, based the evidence I’ve seen, and that was using DDR5 vs AMD’s DDR4

Basically intel have switched to an ARM style BIG.little microarchitecture where the cores are split between high and low power and the package switches between them based on workload. This is why windows has been terrible with the new cpus because the scheduler isn’t/wasn’t accounting for this type of architecture.

it’s also not correct to say that it is an n core where n = e+p because the e and p are either or, not both for any given workload, the correct nomenclature would be either specifying both p and e separately, or n core where n = p.

I wasnt aware intel went back to HT, last I looked they’d given up on it because their implementation was so terrible it was picking up CVEs left right and centre and their new cpus were single thread.

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You are right. My comparison was still based on desktop, which was still 12th
gen against AMD 5000. Seems like 6000 is catching up to a point where it may depend more on the environment / implementation who wins…

What? My newly arrived 12th gen FrameWork and my 12th gen desktop would very much disagree with you. Intel’s P and E cores run perfectly fine in combination. Actually even with Window’s Power Efficiency profile, the P-cores will still be used. Most likely because Intel’s E-cores are far less power efficient then the “little” cores in ARM designs, but that is another topic.

They never stopped using SMT in Out-of-Order designs. It was mostly the lower desktop variants like i5 that had that feature disabled. I do not remember if there ever was an i7 without SMT.

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There was, but basically only one model (albeit with 3 SKU variants) and it received flak early on for being the first i7 without SMT - the i7-9700/K/F/T

This was likely due to product segmentation more than anything as demonstrated if you look at their desktop product stack before and after (6th gen being the last of their “traditional” product segmentation that existed for many years):

Skylake (full-fat 6th gen LGA1151 desktop)
Celeron - 2c/2t with reduced cache and no AVX
Pentium - 2c/2t without AVX
i3 - 2c/4t
i5 - 4c/4t
i7 - 4c/8t

Kaby Lake (full-fat 7th gen LGA1151 desktop)
Celeron - 2c/2t with reduced cache and no AVX
Pentium - 2c/4t without AVX
i3 - 2c/4t
i5 - 4c/4t
i7 - 4c/8t

Coffee Lake (full-fat 8th gen LGA1151 v2 desktop)
Celeron - 2c/2t with reduced cache and no AVX
Pentium - 2c/4t without AVX
i3 - 4c/4t
i5 - 6c/6t
i7 - 6c/12t

Coffee Lake refresh (full-fat 9th gen LGA1151 v2 desktop)
Celeron - 2c/2t with reduced cache and no AVX
Pentium - 2c/4t without AVX
i3 - 4c/4t
i5 - 6c/6t
i7 - 8c/8t
i9 - 8c/16t

Comet Lake (full-fat 10th gen LGA1200 desktop)
Celeron - 2c/2t with reduced cache and no AVX
Pentium - 2c/4t without AVX
i3 - 4c/8t
i5 - 6c/12t
i7 - 8c/16t
i9 - 10c/20t

(we don’t talk about 11th gen on the desktop)

Interestingly, full-fat 12th gen LGA1700 desktop Alder Lake Pentiums now support AVX but full-fat 12th gen LGA1700 desktop Alder Lake Celerons do not.

(I have to keep saying “full-fat #th LGA#### desktop” because there are people even in PC hardware circles that don’t seem to realize that Intel still makes Pentiums and Celerons that don’t use their Atom-derived cores; I particularly ran into this when trying to explain to someone about my own Pentium G3258 not having enough single-threaded performance grunt for a certain task even at 4.6GHz and they and others just kept saying things along the lines of “that’s because it’s a Pentium” or the like.)

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