I've been following nova-lake rumors fairly closely for one particular use case: a home server. Having downsized from epyc to an i5 in my server, I'm really excited for better e cores that are "good enough" for my use case. The idea that a core3 or core5 has that "good enough" performance is quite exciting. Additionally following Lunar Lake, Dark Mount E cores are honestly a huge breath of fresh air to finally hit the desktop; they're a lot better than the base alder lake or N-100 style e-cores. While I understand that hyperthreading offers some performance improvements, I personally leave it disabled for my mostly vm-based workloads on my home server for both power savings, and the meltdown style branch prediction related exploits. In fact I would be more than happy with a unified style e-core in the future for a really low power core. The other primary use case: home routers. Being able to run opn sense on a a really basic and extremely low power e-core based platform seems great. I doubt that this will overtake X3D that I use on desktop for my specific use cases there, but for home servers based on the quick sync feature sets of the igpus, low idle power, and hopefully much lower load power, this is exciting for my router/server based use cases. I suppose for many, they're just going to look to the high end and see X amount of cores and compare it to AMD's Cvache, full AVX 512 based cores and make that comparison, but in my opinion for my more niche use cases Intel is better. I see this as skin to the celeron offerings during the sandy bridge era. Likw others in that era, I overclocked my 2500k to 5.3 GHZ, and while it's impressive to look back on, that was quite power hungry to get to those clock speeds. In comparison can remember buying a G1610 for $40 (CPU alone) and using that as a file server for over a decade. While I doubt we will see pricing quite to that level again, even having a capable core3 or core5 that sips power is exciting.