Question Best p-cores to e-cores ratio for regular use? Alder Lake vs Raptor Lake

[DSlayer_544]

Hi! The i5-12600K has a p-to-e core ratio of 6/4 while the upcoming i5-13600K is supposed to be at 6/8. I'm assuming it makes sense for Intel to add 4 e-cores and keep 6 p-cores rather than using 8 p-cores and keep 4 p-cores, but I wonder how much actual benefits you're getting from having 8 or more e-cores rather than 4. Don't you get some kind of lower return on investment at some point? If you have an average use of your computer (web browsing, some gaming, occasional encoding and such), does it really make sense to want those extra e-cores? Raptor Lake gives you way more of those compared with Alder Lake, it makes it look like 13th gen is more productivity-oriented than 12th gen, or is it supposed to be a strong upgrade for the average consumer too? I feel like the i5-12600K would be good enough for almost 10 years, or would waiting for a 13600K make much more sense for that time frame? Or would you rather advise getting a 12700K over a 13600K? Thank you.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

I feel like the i5-12600K would be good enough for almost 10 years
It all depends on what you're doing and if the app dev's decide to take advantage of the cores/platforms that you're invested in. There are instances where you see the same happen with games, for example how it took a whi9le for Ray tracing to be a staple with game titles now but was limited in how many dev's adopted it in their own titles.

I personally know people who work with a decade old system, without any need to get newer app's and are disconnected from the internet...don't ask why. To them they won't need anything until their system went up in flames.

Some or all apps might take advantage of the core allocations by Intel or none at all if the app aren't revised or updated to suite the newer tech.

I'd advise to wait, if you can, see what the reviews hold and if more people(dev wise) jump aboard Intel's platform.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

Well, the idea with the P and E cores is the P cores do the heavy lifting, and the E cores the background tasks. So for example you might want to game/stream/discord and whatever else all at the same time. This set up allows you to do that, whilst keeping the P cores primed and ready for the gaming load with max boost helping gaming majorly. The best benefit for these chips is on Win11 where the Intel Thread Director passes of easy tasks to the E cores, and lets the P cores run riot!.
In terms of Raptor, I wondered too why there weren't more P cores added as opposed to E cores, and it' mainly relates to power. The P Cores at full pelt will suck down 240w, adding more cores will push the PBP usage higher, and is less attractive.

 

[DSlayer_544]

Thank you! I think there won't be that much change in terms of how multi-threading will be taken advantage of, it took a while but it generalized a lot already when possible, and 16 threads is enough to handle anything decently. If I really start to make heavy use of some hungry app, I'll have to get something much beefier, anyway.

I understand the rational about the cores' roles, but I wonder in practice how much of a difference it makes to have all those extra slow cores for background stuff. Do we have any way to quantify how many threads we would need to avoid bothering the main cores based on use case? Maybe 4 cores is enough for streaming for example, but if we want to do many things at once, when do we start seeing strong diminishing returns, at 4, 8, 16, 32 e-cores ? Can we at least guess where that would be somehow and how it would compare to more p-cores?