For a desktop or mobile processor this might make sense, but many hosting providers sell dedicated hardware with desktop processors to be used in a server environment. (E.g. Hetzner https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex100)
So the provider can save energy and make sense of this, but customers won't notice the energy savings in their pocket and they only notice that they can only use 8 cores.
When I tested this a few months ago under Linux every request of our server application would land on a different CPU leading to funny performance characteristics. Even Ubuntu 22.4 does not seem to have the kernel included 5.16+ that fully supports this CPU (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=adl-linu...)
As we use the JVM the only interesting use case I can imagine would be to assign the slower efficiency cores for the garbage collector.
> As we use the JVM the only interesting use case I can imagine would be to assign the slower efficiency cores for the garbage collector.
Generally speaking trying to run code that shares memory between P and E cores only results in pain. It could work but the software needs to be designed for it.
While there might be some edge cases where it's useful, heterogenous cores don't make a tonne of sense in the datacentre, hence why Intel hasn't made Xeon's with that design.
It seems to me this falls firmly in the category of caveat emptor.
So the provider can save energy and make sense of this, but customers won't notice the energy savings in their pocket and they only notice that they can only use 8 cores.
When I tested this a few months ago under Linux every request of our server application would land on a different CPU leading to funny performance characteristics. Even Ubuntu 22.4 does not seem to have the kernel included 5.16+ that fully supports this CPU (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=adl-linu...)
As we use the JVM the only interesting use case I can imagine would be to assign the slower efficiency cores for the garbage collector.