What if the best of the Core 13 is the union of hardware and software?

We have already seen the performance of the Ryzen 7000 processors and to a greater or lesser extent we will agree that they are not what was expected. Higher performance than expected was prophesied, but AMD has segmented the range into two very specific variants such as these Ryzen 7000 for multitasking and the Ryzen 7000X3D for gaming. Intel is going to respond with the Core 13 and although it raises the bet to 24 cores, the best of these processors may not be in the hardware as such, but in the optimizations of this with the software, specifically, with Intel Thread Director 2.

It has been at the Intel Innovation 2022 conference where we have more answers about what is to come. And it is that in this conference given by Intel the company showed an i9-13900K with its 8 P-Cores and its 16 E-Cores doing something really impressive that improves what is present with the current i9-12900K.

Intel Thread Director 2: a very powerful update for the Core 13

There was a slogan from a famous tire brand that said: “Power without control is useless”. If there is no optimization, you can already have the best architecture, the best frequency and the best IPC, as well as the number of cores, which, as your rival optimizes infinitely better than you, can manage to catch you with much less hardware on paper.

AMD is a good example of this, its Ryzen 7000 processors do not have the highest frequency, nor the largest number of cores and they will not have the best IPC compared to the Core 13, but they compete very decently with the Core 12. We say these because At the Intel conference, Thread Director 2 was presented by Roy Hill, the company’s senior marketing engineer, where it was possible to see the benefits that this technology brings together with the improvements of Windows 11.

We already know that Thread Director is a hardware and software solution, where the processor’s task scheduler is in continuous link with the OS’s, allowing programmers to work with both types of cores transparently. Well, this microcontroller that the Core 12 have has been updated in the Core 13 and it seems Intel has changed the priorities that were before to designate the types of cores to choose.

A much better balance than in the Core 12

Until now, the Core 12 followed the following allocation scheme for tasks with the OS:

• P-Cores -> One thread per core and all threads for HT.
• e cores -> Tasks of only one thread.

The summary is easier to understand than the above: the load of any process passes first through the P-Core and if they were all loaded, it would be passed to the E-Core and finally to the Hyper Threading of the first ones as the last option to the be less efficient.

The process, according to Intel, is transparent, Windows 11 knows the assignments and these can be modified in a period of time. 30 microseconds.

All this is important to understand what we are going to see in the following demo video, because if we see the order that Thread Director 1 uses, what Thread Director 2 achieves is a very important step forward, because it not only balances the load, instead, it prioritizes it by kernel type.

One more step for AI, a leap in performance for the PC

In the team that Intel had for the demonstration, you can see how it goes from loading all the cores in a render to varying the load of these when different tasks are started, to end up in a game.

The charges go from the P-Core and E-Core working in unison, to leaving the P-Core free and charging only the E-Core, for later adapt workload and prioritize the game in the P-Core leaving the E-Core rendering, all without losing an iota of performance.

Logically, this leaves us with a final result of the best performance in gaming as the main priority (for that we are in the Mainstream range) while the rest of the tasks are done in the efficient cores, in the background and without interfering with the performance of the P -Core.

Therefore, Intel Thread Director 2 It is a step forward that now not only rewards a load order, but the weight of the load itself, allocating it to the best type of core and there Intel has a very powerful weapon in gaming against AMD, because it can achieve higher performance with a lower gaming consumption than its rival, all in a fully automatic and transparent for both the OS and the user.