Arcane CPU Tweaks Just Made Buying a Laptop Harder Here's the Info You Need

-P-Cores? E-cores? GPU cores? We break it all down

- By Matt Smith

The laptops hitting store shelves in 2022 will have a lot of cores. Intel’s 12th-gen Core processors for mobile (fave.co/3IjREg4), revealed at CES 2022 and starting to hit the streets now, pack up to 14 cores, and the desktop variants pack up to 16. This isn’t a record (AMD’s Threadripper desktop chip has up to 64 cores), but the new Intel Core line takes many-core processors mainstream.

Intel’s 12th-gen Core also pairs two different types of cores in one processor: an efficiency core and a performance core. This throws a wrench into your next laptop purchase. Now, the type of cores used by a PC’s processor matters. GPU cores add another layer to this puzzle, as companies like Apple, AMD, and Intel are more aggressively advertising the power of integrated graphics (fave.co/3JXFz1d).

All this muddles the once simple, clear-cut understanding of PC core counts. Here’s what you need to know to buy the right laptop (fave.co/3qL4oHf) in this new era of manycore design.

A BIG.LITTLE STORY

Using cores with different architectures in a single chip is an idea borrowed from smartphone chip design.

In their early years, chips designed for phones had an architecture with many cores of the same type, just like PC processors. However, chip architects knew they could increase efficiency if they could instead pair different architectures with varying design.