TL; PhD
- Intel announced its 12th-generation CPU architecture, which will be available this fall.
- It is called Alder Lake and is a hybrid architecture that integrates performance and efficiency cores on a single chip.
- Intel also revealed Thread Director, which is a hardware solution for distributing workload among cores, and it is best suited to run on Windows 11.
Intel has just released its latest CPU architecture, Alder Lake. In the 12th generation iteration, the CPU giant brought a hybrid system-on-chip design, combining efficiency cores and performance cores on a single chip. Through this upgrade, Intel promises to achieve the best of both worlds-the high performance of Performance Core and the energy efficiency of Efficiency Core.
We have seen many of these models with ARM is big.Small Architecture, and recently in Apple’s M1 SoC, but Intel is now introducing it to x86 CPUs. Although these architectures focus on efficiency first because they are designed for mobile devices, Intel pointed out that Alder Lake will focus on performance first.
Alder Lake will still use the 10nm process, now called Intel 7.
Intel Alder Lake: The core of performance and efficiency, and the thread director that governs them
Intel compared its new Efficiency Cores with the old 14nm Skylake cores. Intel promised to increase performance by 40% in single-threaded tasks when using the same power, and 80% in multi-thread performance when using less power.
Then there is the performance core, compared with the 11th generation Cypress core architecture, Intel showed it. Intel promises an average increase of 19% over the previous generation.
Taking into account these two different types of cores will be Intel’s new hardware-based solution-thread director. Thread Director will analyze a large number of different data to help the operating system decide whether to delegate it to Performance Core or Efficiency Core. Intel said that this technology is most suitable for Windows 11.
Also read: We can expect 5 major changes in Windows 11
In terms of the number of cores/threads, Intel said that Alder Lake can reach 16 cores, with 8 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. Each Performance Core will get up to two threads. On the other hand, each Efficiency Core will only get one thread, and the maximum number of threads is capped at 24.
Eight Efficiency Cores will become the standard for desktop and mobile devices. The desktop version will get the full fat 8 performance core design. The mobile version will get 6 or 2, depending on power requirements. TDP ranges from 9W for the “Ultra Mobile” design to 125W for the largest desktop version.
We will also get a unified memory controller, which will appear on all these chips. It will support 4800 MT/s DDR5, DDR4-3200, LPDDR5-5200 and LPDDR4X-4266. The desktop version will also get 20 PCIe channels, of which up to 16 are PCIe 5.0.
Alder Lake will enter the market this fall. Intel will reveal more information about Alder Lake in the coming months, including the exact release date.