this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I wonder what an Intel Core hybrid CPU is

[–] [email protected] 37 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It refers to modern Intel CPUs where there are two types of cores - performance cores (P-cores) and efficient cores (E-cores). This is similar to ARM's big.LITTLE architecture which we've seen in smartphones for many years already.

See: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/how-hybrid-design-works.html

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

12th gen and up intel CPUs. All but a few have P and E cores.

Also like one weird i5 from about 10th gen.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I have a mobile 11th i7 one, sounds like no benefits 😞

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Same boat. Good news is 11th gen generally gets better battery life than 12th+ because all those extra cores still eat power.

Bad news is I already get as bad as 30 minutes of battery life so IDK how 12th gen can be even worse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I thought you saved power because the e-cores are more efficient for the same workload?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but this is Intel, they're not capable of doing something the most efficient way possible. E cores use less power than P cores, but that doesn't mean they're very good at getting the job done using the least amount of power. Currently (using Intel's management) 12th and 13th gen start a task on the P cores, and if it runs for longer than X time it gets shifted over to the E cores where it can churn away. Meteor lake has 3 stages of things since there's P cores, E cores, and LP E cores. If I remember right Meteor lake starts a task on the LP E cores, then shifts it to P cores, then shifts it to the E cores if it's taking too long. But Intel likes to blast the power away with turbo boost and runs the E cores way past their actual efficient zone unless you wrangle them back down. Sometimes it's faster to blast the task away on the P cores then return to idle, other times letting it churn away on the E cores forever is the best way.

Also all those extra cores being active still uses power. So if you went from a 4 core CPU to a 4 + 4 cpu now you have all the same power draw as the old one, plus the extra 4 efficient cores sipping at even more power. I think that's where 12th gen really suffers the most.

[–] megabyteX 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Lol, a lot of wrong information here. 30 mins only, wth. There must be something really wrong with your battery or setup. I am currently writing this from a Legion 5 Slim laptop with 13th gen i7 CPU with 20 cores total, and I get more then four and a half hours of battery life with 85% display brightness in power saving mode.

P.S. this is why I take a lot of information from Linux "pros" like you with a ~~grain~~ truck of salt

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Linux “pros”

I use windows on this machine, and only because windows gets better battery life generally on newer hardware.

I can get more than 30 minutes of battery life. But doing any sort of work on an i9 and having an rtx 3080 active drains the 90 watt hour battery pretty quickly. If I do nothing I can get almost 10 hours of battery life, but that's doing nothing. I get 3 or 4 doing light tasks, or 2 or less doing my normal work with the GPU off simply because I keep the CPU active and Intel CPUs get garbage battery life active. My AMD latptop gets 4+ in the same workloads, and my M1 macbook gets 6+ emulating the same work load. As a person I'm just incompatible with Intels race to idle, and their architecture is based on that.

[–] TheGrandNagus 2 points 6 months ago

They're not really made for power efficiency, but rather space efficiency. ~4 E-cores fit into the size of a P-core.

They're there to boost multi-core performance without having a huge die-size or increasing latency in the P-cores when doing lightly threaded tasks, essentially.

[–] iopq 2 points 6 months ago

Spoilers: they are efficient in space, not really power

So for multicore workloads they are actually power efficient because you get more throughput (more performance iso power)

But for idle that has no benefit

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

My battery life is pretty good, the power profiles daemon is actually working very well.