Within the chip giant’s roadmap, the Intel Alder Lake architecture is emerging as one of the most interesting projects, due to its particular commitment to the “big.LITTLE” concept, a name that will sound to many of our readers, and it is normal, since it has been dominating the mobile sector for several years.
The central pillar on which this concept is based is very simple, integrating one high performance core block and another high efficiency core block. Both can work perfectly simultaneously if necessary, but when not, each block distributes the corresponding workload according to the needs imposed by each task.
For example, think of the Snapdragon 865, a chip that has a CPU that mounts a high-performance core at 2.84 GHz, three high-performance cores at 2.42 GHz, and four low-power cores at 1.8 GHz If we run, for example, an application that only scales in a kernel and that requires high power, only the main core working at 2.84 GHz will be activated. By cons, if we run a game that scales in four cores, the main core and the three cores will be activated at 2.42 GHz. The four low-consumption cores would be reserved for the operating system and workloads. little heavy.
Well, that is the concept that the Intel Alder Lake S processors will adopt. These chips will have a high-performance core block, based on the Core architecture (Golden Cove), and a highly efficient core block, based on the Atom architecture (Gracemont). Each core block will share the workload according to its own requirements, following the pattern that we have indicated in the previous example.
Intel Alder Lake will have configurations of up to 16 cores at 10nm
We knew that Intel was going to be able play around with setting both blocks of cores to offer different configurations, but thanks to a recent leak we have a much clearer idea of what the chip giant could offer.
The source of the news clearly differentiates three families of Intel Alder Lake processors: the «S» series, aimed at the sector of high performance general consumption; the series “P”, which would be Atom chips for servers; and the “M” series, which points to mobile sector, at least in principle. Well, this is how they would be configured:
Intel Alder Lake S
- 8 high-performance cores + 8 efficient cores + GPU GT1.
- 6 high-performance cores + 0 efficient cores + GPU GT1.
Intel Alder Lake P
- 2 high performance cores + 8 efficient cores + GPU GT2.
- 6 high-performance cores + 8 efficient cores + GPU GT2.
Intel Alder Lake M
- 2 high performance cores + 8 efficient cores + GPU GT2.
This leaves us with very curious configurations ranging from the six cores up to 16 cores. They will be manufactured in the process of 10nm, while the GPU integrated in each of them will come in the process of 14 nm, the same that, according to the latest information, will use the Intel Gen11 GPUs integrated in the Rocket Lake-S series, which will be the predecessor of Alder Lake-S .
The launch of the first processors based on the Alder Lake-S architecture is expected by the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022. This new generation will use the LGA1700 socket, which means they will need a new motherboard to function, and they will have DDR5 and PCIE Gen4 standard memory support.
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