How Intel Thread Director improves multitasking performance

Intel's new 14th Gen Core CPUs maintain Intel's industry lead for CPU performance, beating AMD's latest Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs in benchmark tests such as the widely respected Cinebench R23 test.

In addition to winning synthetic tests composed of pure multithreaded operations, Intel 14th Gen CPUs trump AMD CPUs in handling competing workloads, such as when a user's foreground tasks are competing with ongoing background tasks. Through an Intel-exclusive called Intel Thread Director, Intel's most advanced CPUs significantly boost multitasking performance by prioritizing user foreground tasks, resulting in a more responsive computing experience.

Intel Thread Director is a workload management controller on the CPU that works directly with the operating system to ensure that top-priority tasks are executed first and with the highest performance. Intel worked together with Microsoft to implement the new technology, and currently only Windows 11 is able to take advantage of Intel Thread Director. For this reason, we recommend Windows 11 for Stratosphere Pro Z-series. We also offer Windows 10, but Windows 10 cannot take advantage of Intel Thread Director.

Intel's 13th Gen and 14th Gen processors employ an innovative hybrid architecture combining high-performance CPU cores (Performance cores, or P-cores) and high-efficiency CPU cores (Efficient cores, or E-cores) on the same chip. Intel Thread Director segregates background operations on high-efficiency E-cores, while promoting foreground priority tasks to the high-performance cores (P-cores). The least important tasks are assigned to virtual cores, which use free cycles on P-cores through a method known as Hyper-threading or simultaneous multithreading.

The result is the first CPU optimized for multitasking and responsive computing, in which your high-priority work gets the CPU's top focus. Now your top-priority work is far less likely to suffer from intermittent slowdowns and stalls caused by background tasks grabbing the focus of the same CPU cores being used your top-priority tasks. Priority is determined by Windows 11, which monitors which applications are visible to the user, with particular priority given to the application that has the user's current focus, as well as processes that are assigned high process priority in Windows.

Intel Thread Director requires Windows 11, which is uniquely optimized to work with this on-chip Intel microcontroller to manage competing workloads on 13th Gen and 14th Gen Intel CPUs.

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Great expansion, connectivity and reliability:
ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E WIFI motherboard

Above: Stratosphere Pro ZU2 standard motherboard, ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E WIFI. Click to enlarge image and see rear ports

Stratosphere Pro ZU2 features the full-featured, highly stable ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E WIFI motherboard. This full-size ATX motherboard has many outstanding features, including:

• Premium Intel chipset, offering the fastest and greatest number of PCI Express expansion lanes
• Two triple-slot graphics card slots supporting dual graphics cards with plenty of room for large coolers; top slot PCIe 5.0 x16 (x16 mode), bottom slot PCIe 4.0 x16 (x4 mode)
• Four DDR5 RAM slots supporting up to 192GB fast DDR5 memory
• Ultra-fast Gen5 SSD support for primary M.2 slot; PCIe 5.0 x4, 128Gb/s and up to 12,400 MB/s sequential transfer rate
• Three M.2 SSD slots, supporting up to 12TB fast NVMe SSD storage (3 x 4TB)
• 2.5G LAN port, for fast Internet connections and dual network connections
• Wi-Fi 6E with tri-band 2.4/5/6GHz support, for backup Internet connection (use phone as hotspot); desktop antenna for best reception; also Bluetooth 5.3
• USB-C front and rear with 20Gb/s speed at front; 2 rear USB-C ports (20Gb/s, 10Gb/s)
• 12 rear USB ports including 2 USB-C ports; 5 front USB ports including 1 USB-C port
• Superior audio: Realtek ALC4080 High Definition Audio with 120 dB signal-to-noise ratio for stereo output
• Stable power management: 18+1 Phase (90A) power design