You are right. Goldmont Plus isn't really interesting as a product. Even its power efficiency wasn't that good at the time, you were better off with a two core ULV Skylake part.
And so you only really found it in really cheap use cases, and almost everyone ignored it.
But in the context of Gracemont and Crestmont (which are very interesting products, and a massive departure from intel's traditional uArch), Goldmont plus' uArch becomes very interesting, because it's forgotten a stepping stone along the way.
For example, Goldmont Plus has a massive pre decode cache, which kind of makes sense given Intel's plans to add twin decoder clusters to Tremont (and later triple decode clusters to Skymont). Except, Tremont deleted it, I guess that means the idea didn't work out... Again, because this is far from the first time that someone experimented with pre decoding x86.
And so you only really found it in really cheap use cases, and almost everyone ignored it.
But in the context of Gracemont and Crestmont (which are very interesting products, and a massive departure from intel's traditional uArch), Goldmont plus' uArch becomes very interesting, because it's forgotten a stepping stone along the way.
For example, Goldmont Plus has a massive pre decode cache, which kind of makes sense given Intel's plans to add twin decoder clusters to Tremont (and later triple decode clusters to Skymont). Except, Tremont deleted it, I guess that means the idea didn't work out... Again, because this is far from the first time that someone experimented with pre decoding x86.