Heikki Kultala (heikki.kultala.delete@this.gmail.com) on September 13, 2021 2:49 pm wrote:
> Taking advantage of more than 8 threads does not require the workload to be embrassassingly parallel.

I think that Michael does have a point here, albeit it's impossible to tell without empirical testing. In an asymmetric processing scenario, with complex task dependencies, it is entirely possible that the hardware threads cannot be properly saturated, and the smaller amount of faster cores might actually end up faster/more efficient as they can solve the dependencies quicker.

But my gut feeling tells me that these scalability issues only emerge when the number of cores increases significantly. The 8 efficiency cores of Alder Lake is probably still small enough to be a reasonable fit for the majority of real-world workloads. Now, something like 30 cores might have been way too much.