It only shoots the big core in the foot for things that would make meaningful use of the extensions present on the big cores but not on the little ones. Which in a 7w application is what, exactly?

Anything that uses any AVX or FMA3 off the top of my head.

A better mix would have been simply using lower clocked, lower powered cores of the same type or really close derivatives of the big core where the manufacturing process and clocks are what keep power low. Not a mix of Ice Lake and Atom. But right now Intel would throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.

And it seems like a good way for developers to make sure their software stays on the big core.

The fact that they put the extensions in implies they expect meaningful use, doesn't it? If not on this specific part, on a future part with multiple big cores.

Meaningful use in a particular market != meaningful use in all markets.

AVX2/AVX-512 is great in HPC workloads, for example. But nobody is running an HPC workload on a 7w netbook, now are they?

What is useful on Xeon and what is useful on Atom are different. This is an Atom-class SoC used in Atom-class applications, not a Xeon-class one.

That doesn't address what I said at all. This is about extensions that are in this Atom-class SoC.

memcpy?