VideoCardz obtained official slides from an Intel presentation about Alder Lake, which will include both laptop-based chips and desktop CPUs. The slides show the processors will support the PCIe Gen 5.0 interface and faster DDR5 RAM on a new motherboard chipset.
Alder Lake will mark the first time Intel has built desktop CPUs using a 10-nanometer processor, instead of the dated 14nm process. So consumers should expect a significant performance boost. But the question is how much?
One slide mentions an “up to 20% single thread performance” increase, thanks to the “Golden Cove” core design on the CPUs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t specify whether the single thread increase is compared to Rocket Lake, or Intel’s 11th generation laptop processors, “ Tiger Lake,” which also use a 10nm manufacturing process.
The same slide depicts the chip’s heterogeneous architecture, which Intel has previously alluded to. Alder Lake will be built around eight high-performance Golden Cove cores, alongside eight less powerful, but more energy-efficient Gracemont cores, for a total of 16 cores.
The second slide offers a glimpse of the Intel 600 motherboard chipset to power the desktop version of the Alder Lake CPUs. According to VideoCardz, the chipset will appear in an upcoming Z690 motherboard series.
Along with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, the chipset will support older technologies, including DDR4 RAM at speeds up to 3200MHz, and PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 3. However, the chipset will use a new socket type called LGA1700. So older motherboards from Z490 and Z590 series probably won’t be compatible with the Alder Lake chips.
Intel has said Alder Lake will launch in the second half of 2021. We expect the company to first focus on the laptop chips. But whether the desktop-based CPUs will also arrive this year remains unclear.