About Alder Lake CPU's

[XeliGamer]

Hi there just wondering about this say for instance I have a 12600K CPU that has a total of 10 CPU cores and 16 threads .

Which consist of 6 Performance cores and 4 Efficiency cores, now they both run at different clock speeds so if I play a game like Cyberpunk 2077 will I only utilize the 6 Performance cores that will run at 4.9Ghz speed maybe and the 4 Efficiency cores either idling or running with at a lower clock speed wouldn't that cause an issue ?

[RONOTHAN##]

Yup, that won't cause an issue. Modern processors run cores at different speeds all the time, it's no different with Alder Lake.

[XeliGamer]

1 minute ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yup, that won't cause an issue. Modern processors run cores at different speeds all the time, it's no different with Alder Lake.

thanks but will i be using all 10 cores and threads at the same time or just the 6 Performance cores when I game.

[LienusLateTips]

3 minutes ago, XeliGamer said:

thanks but will i be using all 10 cores and threads at the same time or just the 6 Performance cores when I game.

All 10 cores will be active at all times.

 

Whether the game utilises them is another story. Most do, but some legacy games don't.

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, XeliGamer said:

thanks but will i be using all 10 cores and threads at the same time or just the 6 Performance cores when I game.

It depends on the situation. This is something with the actual scheduler for how this will happen. This is the cliff notes for how it works:

 

If the task is heavy like a game, it will prioritize it being on the performance cores unless they're running at capacity. If this task is light weight, it will run on the efficiency cores unless they're running at capacity. 

 

For the most part, games don't really use more than 6 cores, so they'd probably run just on the performance cores. If they do use more than 6 cores, then they will start using the efficiency cores, but they won't be the first thing used for gaming. 

[jj9987]

58 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

It depends on the situation. This is something with the actual scheduler for how this will happen. This is the cliff notes for how it works:

 

If the task is heavy like a game, it will prioritize it being on the performance cores unless they're running at capacity. If this task is light weight, it will run on the efficiency cores unless they're running at capacity. 

 

For the most part, games don't really use more than 6 cores, so they'd probably run just on the performance cores. If they do use more than 6 cores, then they will start using the efficiency cores, but they won't be the first thing used for gaming. 

To be clear, the scheduler in Windows 11 can determine which loads should be on efficiency cores and which on performance cores. If OP is using Windows 10, it can be a hit or miss, because Windows 10 doesn't understand that cores can be different.

 

On Linux, it sort of depends on the kernel version.