Intel has a very clear intention to beat AMD in the market through a two-phase move. The first is to get ahead of Zen 4 with the launch of its Alder Lake processors, both in laptops and desktops. The second is to take advantage of the muscle they have when they produce for themselves to achieve rapid deployment of their processors. This requires your processors to be ready.
What do we know about Lake Alder?
The central cores of Lake Alder are Golden Cove. These are the successors of the Sunny Cove cores, which it should not be forgotten that they are currently in Ice Lake-SP, Rocket Lake-S under the name Cypress Cove and brought to 14nm, and at Tiger Lake and Tiger H-shaped Lake-Willow Cove. Golden Cove will therefore be the core which will serve as the basis for Alder Lake-S for desktops, Alder Lake-P for laptops and Sapphire Rapids which are the next Intel Xeon.
It is also the successor of Lakefield, since Intel will bet on the use of two types of cores in the same processor with different power and consumption. The 8 Golden Cove cores are accompanied by 8 Gracemont cores, which are Intel Atom type and they differ from Golden Cove in three ways:
- They have lower power consumption in operation, but less power.
- They don’t have hyperthreading, so they don’t have multithreading support.
- They are organized in 4-core clusters that share the L2 cache.
New details on Alder Lake-S: frequency and consumption
Thanks to Igor’s lab, we were able to learn new details about the desktop version of the 12th generation Intel Core processors, namely Alder Lake-S. The new processor has two power consumption limits, the power limits or PL1 and PL2. In the case of PL1 The processor can go up to 125 W in a period of 56 s, PL2 instead it lasts 2.44 ms. but with a consumption of 228 W during this time.
it’s about the revision B0 processor, due to its low base speed of only 1.8 GHz we know that this is not the version that will arrive in stores. As for Golden Cove, its Turbo speed, or Boost, we have that it varies according to the number of active cores. In this pre-mass billing version we have the following speeds in Turbo:
- 2 cores can go up to 4.6 GHz, up to 4 cores up to 4.4 GHz, if we want to go up to 6 cores then it can reach 4.3 GHz and with the 8 cores at 4 GHz .
If we go with Gracemont, yesThe speed u with the two active clusters is 3.4 GHz, but with only one it drops to 3 GHz. These speeds were obtained with a voltage value of 1.3147 V. Let’s not forget that each Gracemont cluster has 4 cores.
New chipset for Gen 12
The Socket of this CPU is the LGA 1700, so as we have said several times already, it will be necessary to change the motherboard to use this processor. Considering that cards with the Z690 chipset are due out in the third quarter of this year, that’s a good clue for when this processor will be released. Date also coincides with the launch of the first DDR5 memories and is it Alder Lake-S will support DDR5-4800, But only on plates with Z690, the rest will continue to support DDR4-3200.
Whatever the type of memory, Alder Lake-S will inherit Gear modes from Rocket Lake-S, not only for DDR4 but also for DDR5. The use of two types of memory and the shape of the processor make us think that Alder Lake-S will use two different memory interfaces and activate one or the other depending on the motherboard used.
Regarding I / O, we have that the CPU has 20 PCIe lanes, including 16 for generation 5 and the other 4 for generation 4. Since no M.2 SSD uses the 5th Gen PCI Express interface, this makes sense. On the other hand, the 16 PCIe 5th generation lanes indicate that the Intel Xe-HPG graphics card could be compatible with this interface. Intel has also updated its Fourth Generation Direct Media Interface (DMI), but there are no details on the improvements in this case and we will have to wait for the final presentation.
