Intel “Alder Lake” takes hybrid design and 10 nanometers to desktops

During the year of grace in 2021, Intel will face a competition the company has not seen before. Arch-rival AMD presents stiff opposition in both desktops and laptops, and an ARM camp led by Apple challenges the x86 processor foundation that Intel itself once established. Intel’s response is partly to continue to develop the company’s conventional processors with “Rocket Lake” and partly to meet the ARM camp with a similar design philosophy.

Intel’s own design philosophy is called Hybrid Core and premiered with the energy efficient processors Lakefield. It was accompanied by a performance core with four Atom cores, something that did not praise the market in terms of performance. Intel wants to change that with Alder Lake, like Intel both demonstrates and describes during this year’s CES trade fair. Hybrid Core is used again with new architectures and promises of performance improvement.

Intel demonstrated “Alder Lake,” the next-generation processor that represents a significant breakthrough in x86 architecture and Intel’s most power-scalable system-on-chip. Due in second half of 2021, Alder Lake will combine high-performance cores and high-efficiency cores into a single product. Alder Lake will also be Intel’s first processor built on a new, enhanced version of 10nm SuperFin and will serve as the foundation for leadership desktop and mobile processors that deliver smarter, faster and more efficient real-world computing.

Unlike Lakefield, Intel chooses to introduce two new architectures with Alder Lake, one for the performance cores and one for the more energy-efficient variants. Production still takes place at 10 nanometers, but this time in a refined version of Intel’s Superfin technology. The improvements include faster transistors and a more stable power supply to the processor, which should make it possible to reach and maintain high clock frequencies longer.

Intel’s presentation of Alder Lake does not mention the architectures used in the cluster of cores. The company’s previous product plans for 2021 mention Golden Cove as the next architecture for performance cores and Gracemont for energy-efficient Atom cores. Current Lakefield processors implement a single performance core of the Sunny Cove architecture, accompanied by four Atom cores of the Tremont architecture.

With only one performance core, the distribution of tasks must be efficient, something Intel solves with a hardware-based scheduler. A similar solution is likely to be used in Alder Lake with more performance cores. If the company’s previously announced plans hold, Golden Cove and Gracemont can thus take place in Alder Lake, which in itself takes place in the LGA 1700 socket. The news in the LGA 1700 includes support for DDR5 memories and possibly also PCI Express 5.0.

The Alder Lake processors are part of the Core 12000 series for laptops and desktops and also integrate Intel’s new Xe architecture on the graphics side. The launch is planned for the second half of 2021.

Read more about Intel’s hybrid processors: