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Alder Lake chip puts Intel back on track. Plus, Windows 11 goes beta.

INTEL’S CHIP development might feel as if it has stalled a little compared with AMD’s blistering development cycle, but the blue team hasn’t been idle, and rumors about the forthcoming 12th generation Alder Lake chips have been coming thick and fast. After what seems like far too long, Intel will soon have something genuinely innovative.

Alder Lake will be a hybrid processor, combining Golden Cove cores for performance, and Gracemont cores for efficiency, with up to eight of each. It will use an LGA1700 socket w i th DDR5, and PCIe 5.0 support, but the accompanying chipset is unlikely to feature PCIe 5.0. What you plug into your PCIe 5.0 bus is another matter, there won’t be any PCIe 5.0 SSD drives until later next year, and we’ve yet to see a consumer graphics card that can benefit from PCIe 4.0, let alone 5.0.

Rumor also has it that Intel will start at the top, with unlocked K, and KF versions, along with the performance Z690 chipset. We have seen leaked shots of a motherboard sporting 20 VRMs, so something wants a lot of carefully controlled power.

If this is correct, it means Intel is looking to make a splash from the start. Cannon Lake hardly made a ripple, and neither Ice Lake nor Comet Lake did much better. Even Rocket Lake proved somewhat pedestrian after the smoke had cleared. Meanwhile, each iteration of AMD’s Zen landed with a bang.

A few early Alder Lake samples have been floating about, including a Core i9-12900K. Overall, the word is to expect a 10 to 15 percent performance bump per watt over Rocket Lake, with up to a 20 percent increase in single thread speeds. The first Alder Lake chips are due this fall.

Alder Lake will use the Intel 7 process node and, no, we didn’t miss the ‘nm’ off, Intel has decided to stop using it. For decades now we’ve classified chips as using a process node, which uses the nanometer as its metric. You might think that chips built using a 14nm process will have 14nm features at least somewhere, but nope.

It used to be that the process number matched the transistor’s gate size and the half pitch, but that hasn’t been true since the late 90s. After that, it gets complicated. For a while the node matched the half pitch, but this too became detached. These days, there is no fixed measurement on a chip that equates to the given process node. The number is calculated differently by each manufacturer, a rough combination of measurements, and flimflam.

Different manufacturing processing, and lithography methods have muddied the waters further. The nm value is now just a marketing number: a new node simply means there’s a new manufacturing process which is better, so needs a ‘better’ number.

Intel has invented its own process number, unattached to nanometers. Changes in the Intel node names will now be linked to major improvements in performance, power consumption, and density. When what Intel previously called 7nm arrives, it will be called Intel 4. In 2024, we hope to see Intel’s ‘breakthrough' 20A process using ribbonFETS.

There are two answers to this. One is that Intel is correct. The other, more cynically, is that it would say that, wouldn’t it? Intel is, and has been for a while, losing the node marketing race. It spent years stuck at 14nm, as others raced to 10nm, and 7nm. Its 10nm chips haven’t yet reached the desktop market, and while rivals are already looking at 5nm, it still sells 14nm chips.

This is slightly unfair though, Intel’s 10nm is similar to Samsung and TSMC’s 7nm process. You can understand why Intel wants to drop the nanometer as a metric. A similar move took the base clock frequency out of the chip name a few years ago.

Intel has also revealed some of it roadmap after Alder Lake, which will be followed by Rapter Lake, possibly as early as next year. It will also use the 600 series chipset, and looks to be a refresh of Alder Lake. Following that, there will be Meteor Lake, and a new LGA1800 socket. This is a tile design using Foveros technology, so Intel can mix, and match components. The company plans to be back on top with a commanding technological lead by 2025.

Of course, the blue team has big plans for the future. Alder Lake should put it back in the running, and it appears to finally have a solid roadmap behind it. Bring it on.

With the Alder Lake chips, Intel is looking to make a splash from the start.