Purported first photo of Intel's rectangular Alder Lake-S CPU appears

midian182

Posts: 9,660   +121
Staff member
What just happened? Intel's 11th-gen Rocket Lake processors are set to arrive in the first quarter of next year, but we're already seeing more leaks regarding its successor, Alder Lake. The latest of these is a purported image of the Alder Lake-S desktop chip. As per previous rumors, it has a new, rectangular shape to fit the upcoming LGA 1700 socket.

Videocardz has published the alleged photo of an Alder Lake-S engineering sample. It comes from an unnamed source, so take this with a pinch of salt.

Alder Lake will mark a major change from Intel's usual desktop offerings. It features a hybrid design mixing high-powered Golden Cove cores and energy-efficient Gracemont cores, similar to Arm's big.LITTLE design.

It's believed that Alder Lake will use Intel's recently announced 10nm SuperFin process. The company says this offers higher currents and reduced resistance, thereby improving performance compared to traditional transistor designs.

Earlier this year, leaked documents allegedly from Intel confirm Alder Lake will switch to the LGA 1700 socket, meaning the LGA 1200 socket released alongside Comet Lake will have only been used for two generations of new CPUs. The new socket will be 37.5mm x 45mm, hence the rectangular desktop chip shape.

Alder Lake is thought to support several cutting-edge technologies, including PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory, the latter of which recently saw its first modules released by SK Hynix. It will almost certainly feature Intel's Xe LP graphics engine, too.

We saw a 16-core/32-thread Alder Lake-S processor appear on the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking database earlier this month. The chip, paired with a Sabrent Rocket 4.0 NVMe, was also listed with 30MB of L3 cache and 10x 1.25MB L2.

Intel says Alder Lake-S desktop processors will be released in the second half of 2021.

Permalink to story.

 
16C32T ? I was under the impression that only the big cores would support SMT, so it should be 16C24T. I may be mistaken though.
 
Start of the article, first quarter 2021, end of the article "intel says Alder Lake-S desktop processors will be released in the second half of 2021."
 
Start of the article, first quarter 2021, end of the article "intel says Alder Lake-S desktop processors will be released in the second half of 2021."

well... first its about Rocket Lake and second is about Alder lake... so technically speaking, they are right ;-)
 
16C32T ? I was under the impression that only the big cores would support SMT, so it should be 16C24T. I may be mistaken though.
It's possibly a reporting error in SiSoftware Sandra, because if you look at the actual test results, the maximum shown is 24 - which makes sense if it's 8C16T Golden Cove cores and 8C8T Gracement cores.
 
Hmmm..does that mean air cooler/AIO plates will have to be redesigned for these?

As I doubt the current square shaped norm will make a large enough contact with the CPU to do their job
 
Back