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Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

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21–30 of 126 posts

Re: Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

#21
post #8

> E-Cores are turned off in the BIOS, because setting affinity to P-Cores caused massive stuttering in Call of Duty. I understand doing this for the purpose of specifically analyzing the P-core microarchitecture in isolation. However this does make the test less interesting for potential customers. I don't think many people would disable E-cores in BIOS if they bought this CPU, so for the purpose of deciding which CP…

It’s a problem of compatibility of those games, not an issue with the processor. The kind of thing a game or windows update solves.

Old games won't get updates. That is why there are multiple separate tools that try to force the situation. e.g. Process Lasso

Re: Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

#22
post #18
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many haven't yet grasped the future is heterogeneous computing, especially, when many desktops are actually laptops nowadays. Software working poorly in such setup means no effort was made to actually make it perform well in first place. Games requiring desktop cases looking like a rainbow aquarium with top everything will become a niche, in today's mobile computing world, and with diminishing sales and atten…

Not “no effort to make sure it performs well in the first place”, that isn’t fair. Lots of effort probably went into it performing well, just this case isn’t handled yet and to be fair this only impacts some people currently and there is a chance to update it. This just reads like “if they haven’t handled this specific case they’ve made no effort at all across the board” which seems extreme.

Then why taking the effort to look better that it actually is?

Re: Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

#23
post #7

To see what that means in practice, in my multi generational meta benchmark the 285K lands currently only on rank 12, behind the top Intel processors from the last two generations (i7-13700K and 14700K plus the respective i9) and several AMD processors. https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu . The 3D cache just helps a lot in games, but the loss against the own predecessor must hurt even more.

I don't fully follow this, so what has been gained with the new models? I seem to remember you'd need dedicated industrial cooling for the 14700k. Does the new model at least pump much less power?

So, for one in other software the new processors do better. The 285K beats the i9-14900KS by a bit in my app benchmark collection (which is less extensive, but still). And second yes, according to https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/intel-core-u... for example they are less extreme in their energy usage and more efficient in general, albeit not more efficient than the AMD processors.

But it is a valid question.

Re: Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

#25
post #19
post #8

> E-Cores are turned off in the BIOS, because setting affinity to P-Cores caused massive stuttering in Call of Duty. I understand doing this for the purpose of specifically analyzing the P-core microarchitecture in isolation. However this does make the test less interesting for potential customers. I don't think many people would disable E-cores in BIOS if they bought this CPU, so for the purpose of deciding which CP…

> Real-world gaming results for these CPUs would be worse than what these results show. That's mostly an application and/or OS issue, not really a CPU one.

Tell that to AMDs bulldozer. There is something to be said for considering theoretical performance, but one can't ignore how hardware works in practice, now.

Re: Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

#26
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they still cannot reach power figures they had in the last, 3? generations. 13 and 14 series, which made these figures by literally burning themselves to the point of degradation. intel has no competition to amd in the gaming segment right now. they control both the low energy efficiency market and the high performance one.

Do they? I thought Lunar Lake was an incredibly good efficiency generation.

While Lunar Lake has excellent energy efficiency and AMD does not really have any CPU designed for low power levels, Lunar Lake had also a very ugly hardware bug (sporadic failure of MWAIT to detect the waking event).

This bug has disqualified Lunar Lake for me, and I really do not understand how such a major bug has not been discovered before the product launch (the bug has been discovered when in many computers running Linux the keyboard or the mouse did not function properly, because their events were not always reported to the operating system; there are simple workarounds for the bug, but not using MONITOR/MWAIT eliminates one of the few advantages that Intel/AMD CPUs have over Arm-based CPUs, so I do not consider this as an acceptable solution).

Re: Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

#27
post #14
post #8

> E-Cores are turned off in the BIOS, because setting affinity to P-Cores caused massive stuttering in Call of Duty. I understand doing this for the purpose of specifically analyzing the P-core microarchitecture in isolation. However this does make the test less interesting for potential customers. I don't think many people would disable E-cores in BIOS if they bought this CPU, so for the purpose of deciding which CP…

I think many haven't yet grasped the future is heterogeneous computing, especially, when many desktops are actually laptops nowadays. Software working poorly in such setup means no effort was made to actually make it perform well in first place. Games requiring desktop cases looking like a rainbow aquarium with top everything will become a niche, in today's mobile computing world, and with diminishing sales and atten…

Which is funny because the pushback the PS3 got from developers was too much. Maybe it was "too heterogeneous"

But I guess the future was already set.

Re: Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

#28
post #2

122 points and no comments? Is this being botted or something?

>122 points and no comments? Better no comments than having to trod through the typical FUD or off topic rants that tend to plague Intel and Microsoft topics.

exactly. I'm very happy to notice there are no 'x86 bad arm good' comments here as of now. a welcome change.

also - or maybe, first and foremost - it's just a very good article.

Re: Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

#29
post #7

To see what that means in practice, in my multi generational meta benchmark the 285K lands currently only on rank 12, behind the top Intel processors from the last two generations (i7-13700K and 14700K plus the respective i9) and several AMD processors. https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu . The 3D cache just helps a lot in games, but the loss against the own predecessor must hurt even more.

I don't fully follow this, so what has been gained with the new models? I seem to remember you'd need dedicated industrial cooling for the 14700k. Does the new model at least pump much less power?

> I don't fully follow this, so what has been gained with the new models?

There were power efficiency gains, as well as nice productivity improvements for some workloads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjPXOurg0nU

For gaming, those CPUs were a sidegrade at best. To be honest, it wouldn't have been a big issue, especially for folks upgrading from way older hardware, if only their pricing wasn't so out of line with the value that they provide (look at their GPUs, at least there the MSRP makes the hardware good value).

Re: Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

#30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many haven't yet grasped the future is heterogeneous computing, especially, when many desktops are actually laptops nowadays. Software working poorly in such setup means no effort was made to actually make it perform well in first place. Games requiring desktop cases looking like a rainbow aquarium with top everything will become a niche, in today's mobile computing world, and with diminishing sales and atten…

Which is funny because the pushback the PS3 got from developers was too much. Maybe it was "too heterogeneous" But I guess the future was already set.

When Cell came to be, heterogeneous computing was mostly a HPC thing, and having the compute units only programmable in Assembly (you could use C, but really not), didn't help.

Now every mobile device, meaning any form of computing on the go, has multiple performance/low power CPU cores, a GPU, programble audio, NUMA, and maybe even a NPU.

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