Intel Alder Lake

2021: PC Processor Architecture Announcement

On August 19, 2021, Intel announced a new Alder Lake processor core architecture for personal computers. Hybrid technology is sharpened for low power consumption and optimized performance.

The Alder Lake architecture involves the use of separate processing cores responsible for performance (P-cores) and small energy-efficient cores (E-cores) in chips instead of many identical cores. The first group will work on high-priority, energy-intensive tasks such as games and content creation, and the E-cores will process tasks with lower priority and background tasks. The Intel Thread Director hardware thread scheduler, which communicates with the operating system scheduler, will distribute the load between the cores.

Alder Lake desktop processors will receive eight Golden Cove performance cores and two quad-core clusters with energy-efficient Gracemont cores. Thus, the older Alder Lake desktop versions in the line will have 16 cores, which in total will be able to execute 24 threads, since Hyper-Threading Technology is supported only in Golden Cove cores. Also, 16-core Alder Lake processors will add 30 MB L3 cache.

Intel Alder Lake Processor Core Architecture

The equipment of the 12th generation Intel Core processors includes a new memory controller with support for DDR5-4800 and LPDDR5-5200, up to 30 MB of L3 cache, Xe-LP graphics, as well as built-in PCI Express 16 line 5.0 and four PCI-E 4.0.

According to Intel, a collaboration has been established with Microsoft, thanks to which Alder Lake processors will work better with Windows 11 than with other operating systems.

Alder Lake processors will enter the market at the end of 2021.^[1]

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