From the 12th gen aka Alderlake Intel has introduced a new architecture with a sort of big-little core architecture.
The 12th gen was max 8 performance cores with HT, and max 8 efficiency cores depending on the sku of course.
13th gen Raptor lake is max 8 perf cores and 16 efficiency cores.
One of my system happened to be a 12700K version contrary to most of my systems because been a real ryzen/threadripper fan.
From what i understand the Thread director is a hardware solution that directs work and tasks to either the big core or a little core.
My god this sucks!
For example with faceswap, when i start training it always redirects the training job to the little cores. They choke and its/min drop significantly.
Have every powerplan to ultimate/max super duper, but the tread director just does his own thing.
I can solve the issue by
1 - Keeping the separate training preview window on top makes the work go to the big cores but when having the the normal program window on top work goes to the small cores
1 - Every time manually assign adjust the core affinity of the work process to bypass the small cores.
Damn that sucks,
In the end just disabled the small cores in bios, but a warning for al who think that 12th and 13th gen is a good way to get lots of multithreaded multicore performance.
The thread director is a real *
Disclaimer is that i do run W10, it supposedly been somewhat better in W11