Hardware

From what I'm seeing, even with APO enabled, only 4 E-Cores are actually doing anything. The rest of the cluster is parked, doing absolutely nothing.

Actually, that's false. They're actually consuming power, how miniscule it may be!

And that's one of the many reasons I don't understand why Intel is stuffing so many E-Cores into their CPUs. Their practicality in real-world scenarios is mostly academic from the perspective of most users.

A quad-core or - at most - an octa-core cluster of E-Cores should be more than enough for handling 'mundane' background activity while the P-Cores are busy doing all the heavy-lifting.

Frankly, I just can't help but feel like the purpose of these plethora of little cores it to artificially boost scores in multi-core synthetic benchmarks! After all, there are only a handful of 'consumer-grade' programs which are parallel enough to actually make use of a CPU with 32 threads.

Anyhow, fingers crossed for Intel's mythical 'Royal Core.' A tile-based CPU architecture sans hyper-threading sounds pretty interesting... at least on paper.