BIG cores only kick in for priority tasks and demanding applications like gaming. In theory, background tasks and non-critical tasks are handed over to the little cores, which consume less power and generate less heat. Essentially, you pair “BIG”, powerful, power-hungry CPU cores with “little”, energy-efficient CPU cores on one chip. Mobile SoCs, like Apple’s A and M series chips and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon line, use a BIG.little design for their CPUs. Called Alder Lake, the new 12th Gen CPU family takes design cues from mobile SoCs to create an unusual heterogeneous CPU design for desktop use. Intel also announced a new micro-architecture and a handful of desktop CPUs a few days ago. Intel hired former vice president and CEO Pat Gelsinger, a brilliant engineer who designed the seminal 80486 CPU at 28 (What were you doing at 28, huh?) became VP at 32, and took over as Intel’s CTO for a while before moving to other things. Well, money matters, and Intel’s struggles - and more importantly, falling share prices - finally forced its investors to take note and apply intense pressure to force a company-wide reorganisation effort. Its foray into smartphone chips ended in disaster, its 5G modems were so awful that Apple chose to swallow its pride and make nice with nemesis Qualcomm, Intel’s laptop chips were so bad that Apple thought it prudent to develop its own, and AMD’s now so far ahead on the performance front that Intel CPUs - most notably the current 11th Gen lineup - are a meme. I won’t even pretend to understand why a company with 4-5x the R&D budget of its competitor has struggled so much to maintain its edge, but I strongly suspect that it was a systemic issue brought on by the complacency and bureaucratic inertia resulting from a decade of absolute dominance. And all this while Intel’s competition - AMD and Apple in this case - has been developing newer, faster, and more efficient engines year after year like clockwork. To Intel’s credit, its engineers have been brilliant enough to have kept that 2015 design competitive till last year, but all they’ve really achieved is good straight-line speed at the cost of incredible fuel consumption and so much heat generation that the driver is on the verge of being roasted alive. If Intel were a Formula 1 team, it’d be trying to stay competitive in 2021 by tweaking the car it built in 2015 and pushing it to the brink of destruction. Since 2015, Intel has effectively been stuck on the same 6th Gen microarchitecture (called Skylake) and 14 nm manufacturing process, only managing to tweak core-count and push clock speeds and, by extension, power consumption, to their very limits. It’s been a while since we’ve seen anything exciting from Intel.
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