Intel 12th gen Alder Lake-S rumored to launch in September, expected to feature GT0.5 and GT1 Xe LP iGPUs

Intel previewed the 11th gen Rocket Lake Core i9-11900K processor at CES 2021 and also briefly showed an Alder Lake-based PC running Windows during the presentation. While we know Rocket Lake-S will launch some time during the end of Q1 2021, we are now getting to know that Intel has plans to launch Alder Lake-S as early as September this year.

This information comes via @unikoshardware on Twitter, who claims Intel 12th gen CPUs will arrive in September along with 600-series chipset-based motherboards. As we've reported before, Alder Lake-S will require a completely new LGA 1700 socket, so they will not be compatible with current Intel boards. However, Intel is expected to support LGA 1700 for at least three successive generations of processors. 

Alder Lake-S marks a major architecture change for Intel. The CPUs will be based on an enhanced 10 nm SuperFin architecture and are expected to support PCIe Gen5 and DDR5 RAM. Since we haven't heard of AMD's Zen 4 plans yet, it looks like Intel will have the lead for now in bringing a new architecture to market. In all likelihood, we might get to see the 600-series boards first up for pre-order followed shortly by Intel's Alder Lake-S launch.

The other information we are getting to know is that Alder Lake-S will feature either GT0.5 or GT1 Xe-LP integrated graphics. The Xe-LP in Alder Lake-S will be very similar to the current implementation in Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake-S chips. This information comes via a recent Media Driver Commit on GitHub that also lists the various encoding and decoding capabilities of the new iGPU.

When the first rumors of Alder Lake-S appeared back in March last year, a GT1 iGPU was indicated. This is the first time we are hearing that a GT0.5 is also in the offing. For those not in the know, GT2 is Intel's full GPU with all execution units (EUs) enabled. GT0.5 will, therefore, feature a quarter of GT2's EUs i.e. 24 EUs.

Since Alder Lake-S is primarily aimed at desktops, it can make do with a low-end iGPU as users will most likely pair it with a discrete GPU from NVIDIA, AMD and now, even Intel when it launches the Xe-HPG card.