Intel's Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads

If you want people to take your benchmark seriously, you'd need to provide a very great deal more information on how those numbers are generated. "It's complicated, just trust me" isn't a good enough explanation.

If you want people to listen, you need to have a link where you explain what hardware you're using, what settings you're using, what apps/games you're running, what metrics you're using and how you compute your Magical Number.

My already high level of sceptism is compounded by some scarcely-believable results, such as that according to your testing the i9-14900K and i9-13900K have essentially identical performance. Other, more reputable and established sources do not agree with you (to put it mildly).

That's a strange movement of a goal post, not to mention that using percentages conveniently hides whether PC Gaming as a whole is growing or shrinking.

Hows your post related to anything here?

Is it?

No one has come close to solving the problem of optimizing software for multiple heterogeneous CPU's with differing micro-architectures when the scheduler is 'randomly' placing threads. There are various methods in linux/windows/etc which allow runtime selection of optimized paths, but they are all oriented around runtime selections (ex pick a foo variation based on X and keep it) made once, rather than on cpu/context switch.

This means that one either uses a generic target and takes the ~1.5-2.5x perf hit, or one optimizes for a single core type and ignores the perf on the other cores. This is probably at least partially why the gaming IPC numbers are so poor. The games are optimized for a much older device.

So a 1.5-2.5x perf difference is these days could be 5-10 years of performance uplifts being left on the table. Which is why AMD seems to be showing everyone a better path by simply using process optimizations and execution time optimization choices with the same zen cores. This gives them both area, and power optimized cores without having to do a lot of heavyweight scheduler/OS and application optimization. Especially for OS's like Linux which don't have strong foreground/background task signalling from a UI feeding the scheduler.

In other words heterogeneous SMP cores using differing micro-architectures will likely be replaced with more homogeneous looking cores that have better fine grained power and process optimizations. Ex, cores with even wider power/performance ranges/dynamism will win out over the nearly impossible task of adding yet another set of variables to schedulers which are already NP-hard, and adding even finer grained optimized path selection logic which will further damage branch prediction + cache locality the two problems already limiting CPU performance.

You can replace "for some reasons" with it was scheduled on an inferior core that is used to inflate marketing metrics and should have never been on the silicon in the first place. The CPU in question is a Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 Processor 285K. No one buys this CPU for efficiency. In the absence of actual technical innovation, Intel has resorted to simply attempting to game the system with measures like

1. renaming all your process nodes to the next smaller size even though nothing changed

2. using TSMC process to ship products, when they already own a foundry

3. shipping multiple generations of products to consumers that just flat out destroy themselves, then blaming others

4. adding "efficiency" cores to inflate core counts

5. removing hyperthreading in the name of performance

6. introducing the "i9" series of processors, which are just the previous generation "i7" with a price premium added

7. Renaming all of your product lines to things like "9" instead of "i9" to obscure the absolutely absent generational improvements

8. shipping CPUs that support AVX512 and then disabling it after the product release

9. shipping an entire graphics product line with innovative new features, which do not actually work on launch

case in point: there are no fewer than 7 clock speeds listed for this CPU here on Intel's own page

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241060/...

Which one is it? Why did they only list 7? Couldn't they have listed at least 23 more? Surely there are other clock speeds that are important. Do I have 8 cores, 16 cores, or 24? Can I use all 24? Are those cores the same? Are they even remotely comparable? Do they all support the same instruction set? Do I have 36 Megabytes of Intel smart cache, or is it 40 megabytes? Is this a 125 watt CPU or 250 watts? Does this processor do anything that is anyway different from a middle of the line CPU from nearly 8 years ago, that I can buy a fully working system from a recycler from for less than the cost of this CPU?

At some point you have to blame the driver model on Windows. People have been saying "it's the drivers" for 30 years.

Also most of this is intentional first party behavior from Microsoft. Windows intentionally periodically wakes from sleep to do communication (for notifications etc.) Microsoft's advice last I checked is to not store sleeping laptops running windows in laptop bags.

There's a ton of other decisions they've made that just make the OS incredibly unpleasant on any device with mediocre cooling and a battery. That's why I wrote post: is it bad enough yet that it's intolerable.