Leaked Alder Lake slides highlight key single and multi-threaded performance gains, core configuration, and more
Now that Intel's Rocket Lake line of desktop CPUs are out and about, the internet has shifted focus to Alder Lake. We've stumbled upon a few Alder Lake CPUs on Geekbench and Userbenchmark, but the results are somewhat inconclusive, given the benchmarking software's ability to recognize Alder Lake's cores properly. Videocardz has now stumbled upon some leaked slides which showcase some new Alder features and also reaffirm some leaks from earlier. Several insiders speculate that Intel is expected to unveil Alder Lake sometime in September.
The slides claim that Alder Lake CPUs will be able to offer a 20% performance improvement in single-threaded workloads. This sits in line with a report from earlier, which suggested that Alder Lake's Golden Cove cores would provide up to 20% overall IPC uplift over Willow Cove. Up to 2X multi-threaded performance is promised too, as foretold by yet another leak from some time ago. That, however, is expected to come at the cost of a slightly higher TDP.
This particular Alder Lake CPU seems to be configured with eight Golden Cove 'performance' and eight Gracemont 'efficiency' cores. There's an Intel Xe iGPU thrown in the mix, too. Depending on the number of EUs it packs, we can expect a near-dGPU level of performance from some SKUs, as demonstrated in a Geekbench listing from some time ago. Apple made took ARM's big.LITTLE architecture to new heights with the M1 chip, and it'll be interesting to see Intel's take on it. Alder Lake will also employ hardware-based scheduling.
Existing Rocket Lake, users will likely have to upgrade their motherboards, too, as Alder Lake will be based on a new LGA1700 socket powered by a new line of chipsets. It is significantly larger than Rocket Lake's LGA1200 socket too if leaked images are to be believed. The slides also shed light on Intel's upcoming 600 series chipsets. They confirm that Alder Lake will support DDR5-4800 RAM on desktops and LPDDR5 on notebooks. However, not all motherboard OEMs will want to hop onboard the DDR5 train just yet, with several limiting their SKUs to DDR4, which will be restricted to DDR4-3200.
Videocardz's source told them that only a handful of Z690 boards would be DDR5-ready. PCI Gen5 support touted, too, along with older PCI Gen4 and PCI Gen3 standards. Other Intel 600 series chipset features include integrated Wi-Fi 6E, Thunderbolt 4.0, support for up to USB3 (20G), multi-gigabit Ethernet, and more.
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