Do not get fooled by deceptive core counts of Intel CPUs

For quite many years now Intel has been boasting about their high-core CPUs during the latest two or three CPU generations: 14 cores, 20 cores, 28 cores, sometimes even more!

For example, you may be tempted by, say, an Intel i5-14600, which has a relatively affordable price and a whopping 14 cores!

It wasn't even so long ago that having just 8 cores was high-end, now we are getting 14 cores and even more even in mid-tier CPUs at a quite affordable price.

Except that that "14 cores" is deceptive. In actual reality, for practical applications that benefit from CPU cores, like video games and CPU-intensive applications, that processor has 6 cores.

That's right. Not 14, but 6 cores.

Intel divides the cores into "performance-cores" (which there are 6 of them in this model), and "efficient-cores" (which is the remaining 8 cores). While they aren't extremely secretive about the difference between the two core types, they don't advertise it very visibly either.

In reality the difference in performance between these two core types is enormous. The "efficient-cores" are not designed for computation-heavy tasks (such as video games or rendering). They are designed to run very lightweight background tasks (that operating systems typically run dozens of, at all times.)

The "efficient-cores" are significantly slower than the full "performance-cores". According to my casual testing, those 8 "efficient-cores" combined might get you about the performance of 1 "performance-core", give or take.

So for all intents and purposes, from the perspective of computational power, the i5-14600 has about 7 cores, not 14 (and one of those 7 cores is kind of split into 8 "slow cores".) In other words, if you were to run a CPU-intensive task on all 14 cores, you may get the speed of about 7 full cores, give or take.

In summary: From the point of view of video games and CPU-heavy tasks, the i5-14600 has 6 cores, not 14. It should be thought of as a "6-core CPU" not a "14-core CPU".

The same goes for all Intel CPUs with "performance-cores" and "efficient-cores". If you care about the actual number of cores that such a CPU has, just look at the former number, not the total.

(Yes, there are advantages to the efficient-cores, as they consume less energy and ease the burden of running lightweight background tasks from the main cores, but they should not be thought of as main cores themselves, only as kind of small auxiliary cores. They will not make your games run faster.)