The concept of hybrid kernels, although they are good on paper and give extra performance when needed, has not really been a revolutionary idea and rather seems to be an idea to add better results in synthetic benchmarks in multithreading more than in real applications. More than a year after the launch of the Intel Core 12, we are still wondering what E-Cores bring to games, rather than confusing the process manager of both the game and the operating system.
The Intel Core 12 and 13 have problems in certain games
The concept of multithreading consists of duplicating the control unit of the processor so that when it is waiting without doing anything and, therefore, without performing, it can take another pending task and solve it. It does not double the performance of a CPU, but what it does is bring it closer to 100% of its performance. This measure, however, has a serious problem that is none other than that it consumes a lot of energy and that is why the solution in low consumption devices such as mobile phones was to opt for solving these small tasks with small cores.
Starting with the twelfth generation of the Intel Core, a type of much smaller cores called E-Cores began to be used in some models of the processor for background tasks or those that do not require much power. Now, how does an application know which cores are the right ones at any given time? What happens to old games? This is where we enter cases such as the veteran game from Creative Assembly and its behavior with the last two generations of processors from the blue brand.
Older “Total Wars” fail with hybrid cores
The most affected is Total War: Napoleon, but apparently it affects the rest of the ones that use the same game engine. Keep in mind that this is a nightmare for the game creators as they have had to sit at the desk again to add a patch to the game. The reason? LGames just don’t work or have performance issuesbut it is that at that time it was not necessary to choose the type of kernel in which the game had to be executed.
And no, it’s not for lack of power, the E-Cores have enough power to be able to move games of this caliber without problems, rather it has to do with the fact that many algorithms depend on synchronization to be able to manage the different units of the game and if one is unbalanced with another, then failures and error messages occur.
Actually such issue should not affect models without E-Cores and if you are encountering this issue and want to play Total War on your Intel Core 12 or 13 then our recommendation is that until the people of Creative Assembly do not release the patch that you disable the E-Cores in the BIOS to be able to play without problems what is for many, the best saga of strategy games.