Users will be able to independently disable the cores of Intel Alder Lake processors

The main feature of Intel Alder Lake processors, which are due to debut in the fall, is the big.LITTLE principle, known from the Arm platforms. So, in Alder Lake there will be “large” cores Golden Cove (only they support multithreading) and “small” (Gracemont). And so, as it turned out, in order to better compatibility of Alder Lake with applications and games, Intel will give users the opportunity to disable one of the CPU clusters.

Users will be able to independently disable the cores of Intel Alder Lake processors

This feature was spied on in the Linux kernel after the next update. It will be possible to disable one of the two clusters using the command line or in the BIOS. This is a useful feature, because some resource-intensive application (for example, the same game) may, for some reason, use small cores instead of large ones, and in this case, the CPU performance will dramatically decrease and it will become impossible to play. The second reason for the introduction of the function to disable one of the CPU clusters lies in the AVX-512 instructions – the execution of tasks using them is supported only by Golden Cove cores.

Users will be able to independently disable the cores of Intel Alder Lake processors

And although the ability to disable energy-efficient cores and, accordingly, use only high-performance cores is a good idea, you need to understand that deactivating any of the clusters will reduce the performance of the CPU as a whole. So do not forget to reactivate the disabled kernels later.

.

You may also like