alt Hacker News>> successfully brought x86 to the big.LITTLE core arrangement.
Really? I thought they said using e-cores would be better than hyper threading. AMD has doubled down on hyper threading - putting a second decoder in each core that doesn't directly benefit single thread perf. So Intels 24 cores are now competitive with (actually losing to) 16 zen 5 cores. And that's without using AVX512 which Arrow Lake doesn't even support.
I was never a fan of big.little for desktop or even laptops.
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It's working well for Mac laptops, although I'd rather people call it "asymmetric multiprocessing" than "big.LITTLE". Why is it written like that anyway?
(Wikipedia seems to want me to call it "heterogeneous computing", but that doesn't make sense - surely that term should mean running on CPU+GPU at the same time, or multiple different ISAs.)
Of course, it might've worked fine if they used symmetric CPU cores as well. Hard to tell.
In nearly every generation of Intel chip where I needed to care about whether hyperthreading was a net positive, it was either proven to be a net reduction in throughput, or a single digit improvement but greatly increased jitter. Even if you manage to get more instructions per cycle with it on, the variability causes grief for systems you have or want telemetry on. I kind of wonder why they keep trying.
I don’t know AMD well enough to say whether it works better for them.