I'm surprised they prioritized Windows 11 and not Linux. Is this meant to most benefit consumers? I'd think something so complex would have been first targeted at servers.
Adler Lake (the family of chips this Thread Director is paired with) is being released as a desktop/laptop chip. The largest configuration shown was 8 performance cores + 8 efficiency cores.
Just like whatever Khronos does, AMD, Intel and NVidia collaborate with Microsoft in doig native DirectX hardware support and only afterwards those features show up on OpenGL and Vulkan extensions soup.
To pick one of the list, OpenGL and Vulkan mesh shaders extensions were published in September 2018 [0], while D3D12 didn't support it officially until November 2019 [1] (on insidier preview of 20H1 build, which shipped in May 2020). Granted, there was NVAPI D3D12 extension kludge for it, but certainly Khronos APIs weren't treated worse. Talk introducing mesh shaders presented examples in GLSL, and they said they weren't covering NVAPI because it's ugly. [2]
Fair enough I was wrong on that one, with the small detail that on Khronos it was and still is, a NVIDIA extension, whereas all DirectX 12 Ultimate cards must support it.
I don't think Intel has this sort of hybrid server cpus in their near future roadmap; the next Xeons (Sapphire Rapids) are expected to be pure big core (Golden Cove) configuration.
One thing that springs to mind is, as fas as I know it's not too difficult to manually assign tasks to cores on linux in a way that makes sense to the workload. But I'm not sure if you can do that at all on Windows.
