> For instance, Skymont finally has no penalty for denormals, a long standing Intel weakness.

yeah, that's crazy to me. Intel has been so completely discunctional for the last 15 years. I feel like you couldn't have a clearer sign of "we have 2 completely separate teams that are competing with each other and aren't allowed to/don't want to talk to each other". it's just such a clear sign that the chicken is running around headless

Not really, to me it more seems like Pentium-4 vs Pentium-M/Core again.

The downfall of Pentium 4 was that they had been stuffing things into longer and longer pipes to keep up the frequency race(with horrible branch latencies as a result). They scaled it all away by "resetting" to the P3/P-M/Core architecture and scaling up from that again.

Pipes today are even _longer_ and if E-cores has shorter pipes at a similar frequency then "regular" JS,Java,etc code will be far more performant even if you lose a bit of perf for "performance" cases where people vectorize (Did the HPC computing crowd influence Intel into a ditch AGAIN? wouldn't be surprising!).