The world has recently witnessed Intel’s announcement of new 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs at Intel Architecture Day that marked the launch of their first Hybrid architecture on mainstream desktops.
So, indeed as Intel heads into a new chapter for their CPUs with up to 8 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores, the level of optimizations for this kind of approach will take some time for software devs, game devs to utilize those efficiency cores and the extra threads.
Obviously, you will get more performance from that new 10 nm based CPUs, but the talking point has to be these smaller cores that could actually shake things up for CPU gaming performance. These small cores could become extremely useful because they will help to offload lower priority tasks from the powerful Performance cores while you’re gaming.
Intel’s Hybrid architecture could be decisive if you are a streamer, or while recording your gaming sessions or chatting on Twitch while you are playing your game.
This is what Ran Berenson, the GM of Core and Client Development Group at Intel, had to say PC Gamer:
The best example that we have in the lab is gaming in parallel to whatever other workloads that you’re running. Can be streaming, can be web browsing. They can be like recording the game, this is a great example of the game runs on the Performance core and the side activities run on the Efficient core. And you can run the game in the same performance even if you have other tasks running in parallel.
Intel’s Thread Director Technology will be at the heart of scheduling the priority for the threads of these Alder Lake CPUs. So, doing multiple tasks, even if you are doing heavy tasks like playing games or video editing, you indirectly benefit from having those small Efficiency cores.
Ran Berenson also reckons the fact that Alder Lake CPUs can be properly optimized for games performance if developers have coded their games accordingly:
If the game is optimized to use a lot of threads and it’s not the old, old games today, yes, it will be very beneficial for the game, you know, to run physics on a specific core and run audio announcements on the other core. So yes, there is a lot of room for optimization for games that really know how to utilize all the threads.
Some games utilise more CPU threads, and game devs generally optimized things based on Intel’s newer processors. So, even though AMD has been doubling on threads but there were hardly a few games that would utilize for extra threads, so with Alder Lake, things could indeed change.
However, developers will probably evaluate the current market adoption before going into this specific optimization process. Also, Intel might send incentives to do so. If games utilize a CPU’s full potential, then even older AMD chips with more cores can benefit, but glad to see that the thinking is changing for the industry.
