Intel’s revamped Thread Director 2 could be the Core i9-13900K’s secret weapon

Getting into the weeds of how processors work, and how they work under load with different kinds of tasks, is always a big ask. Luckily, Gordon Mah Ung recently got some answers straight from the horse’s mouth at Intel’s Innovation 2022 conference. Check out the latest PCWorld YouTube video for a breakdown of how the Core i9-13900K and the Windows 11 2022 Update spread the load of professional media and games across its eight performance cores and sixteen efficiency cores.

As you can see in the video, the processor’s newly updated Thread Director 2 can go to max processing on all 24 threads when a single demanding task is running, like rendering lighting effects in Unreal 5. But if you throw another load on top of that, as Intel’s Senior Technical Marketing Engineer Roy Hill does on the demo machine, it’s smart enough to dedicate the performance cores to the foreground task while keeping the efficiency cores humming on the first program.

Not enough? What if you want to go hog wild and throw an intense gaming session on top of both of those tasks? The demo does just that, once again moving background processes to the E-cores while the game runs super-smooth on the P-cores, dedicated to the most pressing foreground task.

We’ll be able to break down the Core i9-13900K and its newly-announced stablemates more thoroughly when we get them in for review. In the meantime, go subscribe to the PCWorld YouTube channel for even more nerdy looks at the latest and greatest in computer hardware!
CPUs and Processors