Daniel B (fejenagy.delete@this.gmail.com) on September 13, 2021 5:20 am wrote:

> In Alderlake, I find it wholly confusing why would anyone care for the little
> cores, and why I'm paying for them. Even in most laptops, A processor should be a small fraction of a laptop's
> energy need, it's the screen and wifi.

In an ideal world you would be right. And modern hardware is fairly efficient when it is not doing much. However, we run into problems when we want to actually want to do something. Intel has figured how to do things fast (but inefficiently) — that's your P-cores, and how to do a lot of things steadily but efficiently — that's your E-cores, but they can't do both. So E-cores on Adler Lake is a way to achieve good throughput (multicore) performance without breaking the power budget.

Arguably the only company right now that has the tech to go fast with reasonable power usage is Apple (they need 5 watts to deliver a level of performance Intel and AMD need 20 or more watts), but even Apple uses efficiency cores on desktop, because it's a great way to get all that pesky background services out of the way.

> In a smartphone, I don't get why not properly design a mid-field core,
> rather than have high performance which most people never need, paired with low performance with may not
> be enough often not to engage the HP core.

Low-latency computation is still crucial to good user experience. In that, smartphones are not that different from desktops or laptops. And as Andrei mentions above, the modern ARM answer to this are three levels of cores, with one dedicated burst core for UI (and benchmarks of course).