However this result also omits the most interesting point!
Apple has more experience than Intel (or anyone else) at the use of small vs large cores on mobile, tablets, and "PC"s.
And they concluded that, tiny as their small cores are,
That isn't really applicable to Intel and their "efficient" cores. Their aren't really tiny and impoverished. Basically these are more space optimized broadwell (Gen 5) cores (that stop at AVX2 ) level of performance on a process shrunk node. It makes them relatively efficient. But mainly just smaller.
it wasn't worth putting even 4 of them on a "high end desktop" class machine. Which suggests that for the sort of work these machines are expected to perform, small cores just aren't worth much.
Apple's aren't worth much. Intel's are substantively more powerful. They are just relatively small compared to the AVX-512 and the kitchen sink large cores.
One or two are valuable to save power when reading email and watching movies, but they can't do much for heavy lifting. I'm honestly surprised by this -- I expected Apple to take by far the easier path of just cut-and-pasting the 4-core E-cluster. And yet they did not -- and they have far more real world knowledge than us.
A P core can "race to sleep" pretty fast if assigned only E core level work on a mostly idling SoC. On lightweight work it isn't necessarily the "burn power like no tomorrow" option for that kind of workload.
The problem with the Intel P (performance ) cores is that they are bulky big. To match the instruction set coverage in P and E in Alder lake they just have "dead" AVX-512 dangling in there.
Intel is trying to match AMD on the core count but isn't on 7nm. So Intel largely isn't trying to shrink the E cores too small. Just small enough to make up the gap "losing" because behind on process density.
For mobile Gen 12 (Alder Lake) mobile, Intel is going to cap out the P cores at 6. ( down from desktop 8). That is in part to save space as well as power. The E cores aren't being cut. ( not as big of a space hog in addition to lower power).
So Alder Lake may look good in raw thread count, but in real life is the config above realistically going be essentially an 8+2 machine, with the other 6 small cores irrelevant to anything?
That is mostly dependent upon the Windows 11 scheduler and application workload delegation.
High end Ryzen desktop Intel is competing against 16 cores. Stopping at 8 cores is a problem when it comes to trying to match in Multithread performance.
On mobile Ryzen is caps at 8 ( 16 threads ) , but Intel is more limited to 6 P. and 2C on the low end TDP mobile models) But if throw 8 "E" at the problems they should be able to pass the AMD. Just has to be about the same power the Ryzen mobile. Intel was probably also nervous about AMD maybe switching up and pushing mobile onto smaller nodes first ( instead of last ... so that could go past 8 cores ).
In short, I doubt Intel would be on this path at all if they were still 1-2 years ahead of everyone on process node fabrication skills.
Both Intel and AMD aren't throwing as much transistor budget (and bandwidth) at the iGPU as Apple is. That is another reason why Intel has a bigger budget for E cores.
On some future iterations where Intel wants to throw a substantially bigger iGPU tile/chiplet into the package then I suspect we'll see some shrinkage in E core count.
