Wait, hold on. I said what now? I'm suspicious of MLID's claim that there will be an ICL/CML-like split, if anything. Or did you mean desktop?
Yes desktop haha.
But at the end of the day, I think it would be good for Intel if they could quickly phase out an uncompetitive lineup (Raptor Lake mobile)
I don't think the CPU comparisons will be bad, at least performance. The GPU is a problem.
But it doesn't really matter if Raptorlake mobile is having a comprehensive lineup. Then Meteorlake mobile is going to come 12 month later, period.
You still have Tigerlake products coming out. The cheap Aya NEO and AYN products are Alderlake devices coming in late 2022. Manufacturers are simply going to skip either if one comes much earlier than 12 months.
It makes no sense investing all that money designing, optimizing, and making a laptop* just to replace them in 6 months. Even 9 months doesn't happen. They have about 2 months gap between product announcement and delivery for laptops. For desktops you can buy it the day it's launched.
You have Alderlake mobile coming now. Actually it's been about a month but you get my point. And say you are launching Raptorlake next month. Zero sense for laptops.
*The optimization in laptops are far, far greater than what desktops guys can imagine. Lots of the laptops until recently couldn't support C10 properly because of driver/firmware/BIOS limitations. It's just hard, because if you don't do it right, you might result in an unstable system. BIOS programming, driver programming, OS settings, circuit design, all have to come seamlessly in order to create the post-Haswell efficient laptops today. It's not "Oh just connect them together and done. Voila!" like in desktops. That's why drivers are heavily customized in laptops and not just downloads from hardware guys.
Feel like it would be better for each to remain uniquely specialized. Efficiency and/or area for Atom, single core performance for Core. Though maybe it wouldn't hurt to unify the ISA...
So bear in mind I am pro-hybrid approach. That said,
It's always a tradeoff. So apples-to-apples the square root law says 30% performance needs a core that's 70% larger. Also the single core focused design will have higher frequencies, so that'll result in the core larger as well.
Even if the E core is far superior in both perf/watt and perf/mm2 metric, a core that's better in single thread will be very valued.
Also in theory, the hybrid approach allows oversizing the P core to be larger and more performant than it would be otherwise. You don't have many cores, thus you can make it bigger than if you are trying to balance max MT and max ST performance. I think this part will take several generations to be realized, and part of the reason for the rapid growth for ARM cores.
Rather than:
-16x P with 1x area/perf
You'd have
-8x P with 1.15x perf at 1.5x the die area, and 32x E cores