Hardware

Apple's E-cores were never useless, they're easily best in class by a large margin. They've got the best perf/W in the industry by a country mile really, the things sip power, and while they're not the fastest little cores, they are still extremely potent. I don't see them changing away from that core structure any time soon.

As for the GPU, idk off the top of my head, but the IP is likely similar to A17. I wouldn't expect much - the main advantage is the addition of hardware RT support, but from what we've seen the RT capabilities aren't hugely improved over shaders. Definitely going to be a more modest improvement than prior iterations here.