Comment by themafia

1 day ago

> Apart from some models of Alder Lake, it is now impossible to buy an Intel chip that does not have at least P (Performance) and E (Efficiency) cores.

Really? I just bought one:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236786/...

> Apart from some models of Alder Lake

That bit actually still applies. Intel may have branded the 14100F as Raptor Lake, but it is almost certainly Alder Lake silicon, just a higher speed bin of the 12100F.

See https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/compare.htm... and note how none of them get the higher DRAM frequency support or larger L2 caches characteristic of Raptor Lake silicon.

How about change that to "Anything with more than 6 cores". Anything with 4 cores only has one speed of core. At 6 cores it more of a mixed bag, some have all the same cores, some have a split of performance and efficient cores. Anything over an i5 will have E cores.

  • Hmm, I think Granite Rapids is all P-Cores and goes up to 86 cores (172 threads):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Rapids

    • Yep, there are still server CPUs with only P-cores.

      They are a bit expensive but I wouldn't expect them to drop these skews in the long term for HPC & compute bound workloads. My guess is that diamond rapids will also have some P-skews and maybe AP skews.

    • Here there's weirdness, still, though because there's such a frequency difference you'll get between "low priority" and "high priority" cores.

The i3-14100F is just one example - Intel still sells numerous non-hybrid models across their lineup including most i3s, Pentiums, Celerons, and many server/workstation Xeons. The documentation's claim about availability is overstated.

There are also Xeons, but it limits an OS to use in data centers.

  • There are workstation Xeons. Though it seems that mobile Xeons are defunct now.