I'm really curious to see what they do with the hardware scheduler...
ARMs big.LITTLE came with multiple issues to the scheduler, at least from a Linux perspective, I would assume Windows is the same and no idea if MS has done much to deal with it. But basically previously schedulers treated all cores, and all threads, as equal (ish, threads had/have priorities), 'simple' (it's really not
)
Once you start having different cores you need knowledge of the hardware to fully exploit that and it all becomes a lot more complicated. This at least is for full 'Heterogenous multi processing', e.g. using all cores at the same time. If Intels hardware scheduler is designed to remove this need then I think the most likely option would basically be 'paired cores', e.g. for each little core there's also a big core that are visible as just one core, the chip then decides when to switch between cores internally, kinda like boosting speeds based on load. But this removes any possible performance benefits of it (in fact it will drop performance slightly), it does however work for power which is always what the ARM approach was and likely is also what Intels main gains will be.
I'm not sure windows would cope well with the alternative where it starts a process running on core 0 and it decides to switch that to core 16 or whatever.
But, that does mean we're basically looking at an 8-core/16-thread processor which would be a big marketing fail.
If they crack it then all kudos to them, so not saying it's impossible but it's gonna be really interesting to see how/what they do...
Yea 8 cores over the 11900k, but the small cores are very weak and run very slow speed and don't do HT - good enough to run background tasks like drivers, Windows processes, web browsers etc and keeping the high performance cores exclusively for the game threads with no core load swapping like the 5950x does
that is where the benefit comes, the 5950x is unable to keep its best cores exclusively for the game, Windows will keep pushing work around which means all cores get used for remedial stuff like background processes, alder lake resolves that by forcing background tasks to the mobile chip performance small cores and leaves high performance desktop cores just for the game/compute work loads
That only works if Windows knows what cores are small cores and uses them appropriately, e.g. MS making big scheduler changes. How does Intel know at the hardware level one thread is a background process and another is the game we want at full speed. I guess Intel could have a driver/service running that monitors processes and informs the hardware scheduler but this raises even more questions, like privacy? and are we really going to want to rely on Intel for 'Game Ready' drivers everytime new software is released?
