“Performance” Oryon: Qualcomm’s Little Core

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite uses a hybrid core setup, breaking away from the all-big-core strategy that the company previously used with in-house core designs. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E96100 contains 18 cores, divided into 6 “performance” cores and 12 “prime” cores. Qualcomm’s “performance” cores fill the same role as little cores or efficiency cores on other chips, so I’ll be calling them E-Cores for simplicity. Like E-Cores on other chips, Qualcomm’s E-Cores are optimized for lower power and performance points than their big-core counterparts. These smaller cores can contain background tasks and lightweight applications that don’t require maximum performance, which saves power by not waking up the big cores. Under heavy multithreaded workloads, the E-Cores can step in to boost overall throughput.Here, I’ll be looking at Qualcomm’s E-Core architecture in the Asus Zenbook A16 UX3607OA, which Asus has kindly sampled.Core OverviewQualcomm’s E-Core is a 4-wide out-of-order…