P-cores and E-cores in virtual machines

Abstract: In 2021, Intel released a new generation of consumer processors that had two different types of cores; they called them the efficiency-cores and the performance-cores, or for short, the E-cores and the P-cores. The release of these processors sparked interest in the potential impact if they were introduced into the enterprise market. Therefore tests were made on the I5-13600k on its power consumption and how it performs in virtual machines. Since the architecture is so new, there have not been any tests on the power usage in different configurations, which is a hot topic with today's power prices. The first question to be answered was: "How can one get the new architecture to function in virtual machines without mixing the various types of cores?" To solve that, the command “virsh edit” was used and then the name of the virtual machine to choose which threads to use for the virtual machine. The second question was: “how different is the power consumption between different configurations?” And to answer that, a power meter was used to measure the power consumption, which resulted in the Linux virtual machines drawing less power than the Windows 10 virtual machines. The third question was: “what is the performance of the processor in virtual machines?” To answer that, a benchmarking tool called Geekbench was used, which showed that the P-core only machine performed best as expected. The fourth and last question was: "What is the use case for having different types of cores?" From the tests, these processors shouldn’t be produced for the enterprise market, but small companies and enthusiasts can use them for servers when they need more cores