Intel Alder Lake-S spotted
Intel’s 12th Gen Core series is to embark on a journey to our desktops next year. The company promised to launch its hybrid big/small core architecture in the second half of 2021. The series is officially confirmed to feature Golden Cove (big) and Gracemont (small) core architecture.
This is not the first attempt to deliver hybrid technology to x86 desktop processors. Earlier this year Intel unveiled its 11th Gen Core “Lakefield” series for ultra-low power devices. The series is offering a single big (Sunny Cove) core paired with four small cores (Tremont).
Alder Lake takes this to another level with up to 8 small cores paired with 8 big cores. This design will involve Inte’s next-generation hardware scheduler to take full advantage of the available computing cores and provide seamless software support.
Over the weekend Notebookcheck published an exclusive claiming that Alder Lake-S will support both DDR5 memory and PCI-Express Gen5. While DDR5 support is to be expected, PCIe 5.0 support is still a bit surprising, as the main competitor – AMD – has not yet made any official promises for both standards. Regardless of what interfaces it supports, it will still be Intel’s biggest technological leap since the first Skylake processor was released.
A new set of benchmark results have appeared on Sisoftware database website. The device is detected with 16 physical cores and 32 threads, confirming the maximum core count for Alder Lake-S. The CPU is detected with 10x 1.25MB of L2 cache and 30MB of L3 cache. The L2 and L3 caches appear to be the same size for Golden Cove as for Willow Cove, while the smaller Gracemont cores appear to be clustered with shared caches. The “DRR4” could be a typo, but it may also refer to DDR4 for Alder Lake-S mobile series, leaving DDR5 exclusive to desktops for now.
The processor, naturally, does not have 32-threads. This is a misread by the software. Only the big cores will offer hyperthreading, so the correct thread count is 24 (16+8).
Intel Alder Lake-S on Sisoftware
Aggregated results of Intel Alder Lake-S on Sisoftware
| INTEL Mainstream CPU Series Specs | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz.com | Coffee Lake-S | Comet Lake-S | Rocket Lake-S | Alder Lake-S | Meteor Lake-S |
| Launch Year | 2018 | 2020 | 2020-2021 | 2H 2021 | 2022-2023 |
| Fabrication Node | 14nm | 14nm | 14nm | 10nm SuperFin | 7nm SuperFin? |
| Core µArch | Skylake | Skylake | Cypress Cove | Golden Cove + Gracemont | Ocean Cove + Gracemont |
| Graphics µArch | Gen9 | Gen9.5 | Gen12 | Gen12 TBC | Gen 13 TBC |
| Max Core Count | up to 8 cores | up to 10 cores | up to 8 cores | up to 16 (8B+8s) | TBC |
| Socket | LGA1151 | LGA1200 | LGA1200 | LGA1700 | LGA1700 |
| Memory Support | DDR4 | DDR4 | DDR4 | DDR5 | DDR5 |
| PCIe Gen | PCIe 3.0 | PCIe 3.0 | PCIe 4.0 | PCIe 5.0 | PCIe 5.0 |
| Intel Core Series | 8th/9th Gen Core-S | 10th Gen Core-S | 11th Gen Core-S (?) | 12th Gen Core-S (?) | 13th Gen Core-S (?) |
| Motherboard Chipsets | Intel 300 (eg. Z390) | Intel 400 (eg. Z490) | Intel 500 (Z590) | Intel 600 (eg. Z690) (?) | Intel 700 (eg. Z790) (?) |
Source: Sisoftware via @TUM_APISAK
