Following in the footsteps of the 11th generation Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake processors, Big Blue brings it all together later this year with the Intel Alder Lake series of processors, based on the big.LITTLE high-performance hybrid design from which it was pioneer the semi-British driver. steady arm. LITTLE is all the rage right now, thanks in large part to the huge success of the Apple M1 chip, which replaced Intel's silicon in last year's Apple MacBook Air, the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro, and the Mac Mini, and which will soon It will be launched. on Apple's new iMac. Apple is so committed to its new silicon that we're already hearing rumors about the next-generation Apple MX chip that could power Apple's most powerful 16-inch MacBook Pro later this year. So it's no surprise that Intel is creating its own MX rival, based on the same architecture as Apple's silicon first developed by Arm. Known primarily as the big.LITTLE but also "hybrid" architecture, this design features a combination of high-performance, low-power single-threaded cores to handle low-emergency cores and background tasks. drive. heavy workloads. Despite being very popular for low power mobile devices for over a decade, big.LITTLE processors haven't been powerful enough to tackle the most demanding applications on the market like Adobe Creative Suite, but this is rapidly changing with the Apple M1. chip showing the kind of performance the design is capable of when powering traditional desktop workloads. No wonder we're excited to see what Intel can do with the new architecture. This is a major milestone for Intel, which has been used to using its own design for decades, and after some stumbles in recent years and its losing ground to AMD, a change is definitely warranted. So what do we know about Intel Alder Lake, the first major revision to a generation of Intel processors for as long as anyone can remember? The early rumors are promising and we're here to tell you everything we know, from the expected release date and clock speeds to what we've seen about potential benchmark leaks.
Come to the point
- What it is: Intel 12th Gen Processor Series for Desktops and Laptops
- When was it launched: towards the end of 2021
- How much will it cost? Probably from € 125 / € 90 / AU € 160
(Image credit: Intel)
Intel Alder Lake Release Date
Though no official release date has yet been given, Intel revealed at CES 2021 that it expects Alder Lake to arrive in the second half of 2021, while the company's former CEO Bob Swan said it will "grade desktops." and Alder Lake portables for production and will begin our ramp-up in the second half of 2021." There was a lot of speculation that Intel was on track for a September 2021 release for Alder Lake, just about six months after the launch of the 11th-gen Rocket Lake desktop processors, but news is making the rounds more recently that shortages of the The semiconductor world is starting to affect Alder Lake's release schedule, possibly pushing it back to November 2021. While not too difficult for desktop owners, given that Rocket Lake has just been released, but even with the With Tiger Lake processors getting an upgrade soon, laptop enthusiasts will be particularly disappointed by the delay as Alder Lake promises to really shine. on a laptop, thanks to improved power efficiency that translates to longer battery life (who wouldn't want a gaming PC that can run six hours or more on battery? Hopefully, at least). Still, Intel has been pretty quiet about any delays caused by semiconductor shortages. Also, Intel makes much of its semiconductors itself, rather than relying on vendors like TSMC for all its silicon like AMD and Apple do, so Intel might be in better shape than its rivals in this regard, albeit without doubt they will. feel pressure in your supply chain.
(Image credit: Videocardz)
Intel Alder Lake Specifications
The first thing you need to know about the Intel Alder Lake specs is how the new architecture will split between efficiency and performance cores. Gracemont is the name Intel gave to Alder Lake Efficiency Cores, and they are designed to handle background tasks and certain system functions, such as power management of the computer from sleep mode, waking up the suspension, connection management, and similar menial tasks. The Golden Cove cores are what Intel plans to use for more demanding tasks like gaming, video processing, etc. If any important software is being developed for your computer, even Google Chrome, it will likely run on Golden Cove cores, while other lower-priority apps and tasks will be moved to Gracemont cores, freeing up resources for the higher-priority task. demanding and immediate at hand. In this way, this arrangement is sure to benefit even those desktop PC users who, whether they realize it or not, are constantly wasting precious clock cycles on their high-end Core i9 and Ryzen 9 processors on things like upgrading the system clock. and poll connected devices. devices like printers even when playing the latest and greatest PC games. We also know that Alder Lake will consolidate all three tracks of low-power desktop, laptop, and mobile processors into a single 12th-generation processor platform, with Alder Lake-S being the desktop designation, and Alder Lake-P being the desktop designation. laptop. processors, and Alder Lake-M is heading towards mobile devices. A benchmark that went live a few months ago indicated that Alder Lake-P might have 14 cores and 20 threads, which would be a bit unorthodox since core counts have increased until recently. Typically cores are a power of two, so two cores/four threads, four cores/eight threads, eight cores, etc. But the big.LITTLE architecture allows for interesting mixes, as the Alder Lake-P chip can have six Golden Cove cores with 12 threads along with eight Gracemont cores with eight threads. Other permutations are possible as well, so until we see something specific to Intel, everyone is guessing.
(Image credit: Videocardz)
As for the performance of these cores, it's also a bit hard to say. The first few benchmark leaks were a bit confusing, as the benchmarking tools weren't designed for the big.LITTLE architecture, so they might have had trouble correctly measuring the performance of the new processors. However, these benchmarks appear to have clocked one of the Alder Lake cores to a base frequency of 2,2 GHz, which is too low for it to be a Golden Cove core. It is much more likely that this is the base frequency for one of the Gracemont cores, which is fast enough for an efficiency core. In fact, overall benchmark performance indicated that the tested Alder Lake chip outperformed a 9th-gen Core i9900-2015k in single-core performance and knocked it out in multi-core performance. It has also been speculated that the Gracemont cores could have a performance level similar to Intel's XNUMXth generation Skylake processors, released in XNUMX. Although old by today's standard, they would be much more powerful than the efficiency core type. . most of us were waiting.