For an office workload, or a mobile workload, this makes sense – if you’re in Excel, for example, you want Excel to be on the performance cores and those 60 chrome tabs you have open are all considered background tasks for the efficiency cores. But ultimately, the peak performance should be identical.Īt Intel’s Innovation event last week, we learned that the operating system will de-emphasise any workload that is not in user focus. Intel says the net result of this will be seen only in run-to-run variation: there’s more of a chance of a thread spending some time on the low performance cores before being moved to high performance, and so anyone benchmarking multiple runs will see more variation on Windows 10 than Windows 11. It assumes the efficiency is equal, but the performance differs – so instead of ‘performance vs efficiency’ cores, Windows 10 sees it more as ‘high performance vs low performance’. The only thing Windows 10 doesn’t have is insight into the efficiency of the cores on the CPU. Intel has said that Windows 11 does all of this. The operating system scheduler is then the ring master, combining the Thread Director information with the information it has about the user – what software is in the foreground, what threads are tagged as low priority, and then it’s the operating system that actually orchestrates the whole process. With that information, it sends data to the operating system about how the threads are operating, with suggestions of actions to perform, or which threads can be promoted/demoted in the event of something new coming in.
It knows what threads are where, what each of the cores can do, how compute heavy or memory heavy each thread is, and where all the thermal hot spots and voltages mix in. To this end, Intel created Thread Director, which acts as the ultimate information depot for what is happening on the CPU. As we’ve already discussed, the new Alder Lake design of performance cores and efficiency cores means that not everything is equal, and the system has to know where to put what workload for maximum effect. In a normal scenario the expected running of software on a computer is that all cores are equal, such that any thread can go anywhere and expect the same performance. Fundamental Windows 10 Issues: Priority and Focus
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