Intel i9-12900K Alder Lake Linux Performance In Different P/E Core Configurations
Starting off were a few Linux gaming tests... For lightweight games or aging open-source titles, even primarily using the E cores can lead to quite playable frame-rates for such non-demanding titles like Tesseract.
When primarily using the E cores was around an 18 Watt average power consumption rate to 32 Watts in the default configuration. Or a 39 Watt average when running with all P cores and HT enabled where there wasn't the ability to primarily offload to the E cores.
With the Xonotic and Unvanquished shooter games, the best performance was found with 8P + HT for leaving the E cores disabled.
But moving onto non-gaming workloads under Linux that tend to be more thread happy, NAMD shows the benefits of being able to use all available cores/threads even the E cores.
NAMD on the E cores (plus 1 P) led to a 82~90 Watt CPU power consumption while tossing in the P cores led to around 200 Watts for the Core i9 12900K under this workload.
Meanwhile with GROMACS the performance suffered a bit with Hyper Threading enabled for the default run due to the added contention with MPI.
Or even for the Xmrig CPU miner with Monero, the default configuration was behind just having all the pghysical cores enabled without Hyper Threading or just running the P cores with HT enabled.