Intel 10nm Alder Lake-S with 16-cores and 24 threads
Intel already confirmed it intends to launch its Alder Lake desktop processor series by the end of next year. This will be a major launch for Intel, as the company will finally move away from its 14nm fabrication process technology. Intel Alder Lake will also be the first architecture to support DDR5 memory technology and possibly the PCIe 5.0 interface standard.
More importantly, though, Alder Lake will bring new technology to the mainstream market, the hybrid core design. What this means is that the CPUs will feature both high-efficiency (small) and high-performing (big) cores. For this very reason, the leaked Alder Lake CPU that has just appeared on Geekbench has 16 cores but only 24 threads, as the small cores do not support hyperthreading.
The CPU appears with a base clock of just 1.38 GHz, which could be the base clock of the high-efficiency cores. The maximum reported frequency of 17.6 GHz is just an error, and it should probably be the turbo frequency of the same cores, but divided by 10 or 8. The software does not appear to be capable of reading the data from the processor yet.
Intel Alder Lake will be the manufacturer’s new hybrid design, following the low-power Lakefield series, which features Sunny Cove (big) and Tremont (small) cores. The CPU that leaked will have 8 big cores and 8 small cores. It appears that the whole package has 30 MB of L3 cache, and 1.25MB of L2 cache per core, which is similar to what we saw almost 2 months ago in the SiSoftware Sandra leak .
Intel Alder Lake 16-core CPU Specifications, Source: Geekbench
Performance-wise, the CPU appears to be severely limited, even the Rocket Lake-S based CPU sample that we saw earlier this week (which has not yet been released) scored 80% higher in the single-core benchmark.
Intel Alder Lake 16-core CPU Performance, Source: Geekbench
Intel 12th Gen Core (Alder Lake-S CPU), Source: VideoCardz.com
| INTEL Mainstream CPU Series Specs | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz.com | Coffee Lake-S | Comet Lake-S | Rocket Lake-S | Alder Lake-S | Raptor Lake-S |
| Launch Year | 2018 | 2020 | Q1 2021 | 2H 2021 | 2022-2023 |
| Fabrication Node | 14nm | 14nm | 14nm | 10nm SuperFin | TBC |
| Core µArch | Skylake | Skylake | Cypress Cove | Golden Cove + Gracemont | Golden or Ocean Cove + Gracemont |
| Graphics µArch | Gen9.5 | Gen9.5 | Gen12.1 | Gen12.2 | Gen 12.7 |
| Max Core Count | up to 8 cores | up to 10 cores | up to 8 cores | up to 16 (8+8) | 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: Geekbench via @TUM_APISAK