THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Intel’s hybrid technology reaches the desktop

AS WE WRITE, the official launch of Intel’s Alder Lake-S chips is within sight. Alder Lake is a 12th-generation chip employing a new LGA 1700 socket, so new boards are required. It’s a hybrid architecture, mixing Golden Cove cores for power, and Gracemont cores for efficiency. Each Golden Cove core gets 1.25MB of L2 cache and there’s up to 30MB of shared L3 cache, DDR5 support, and PCIe 5.0 lanes. Next year, it will reach laptops, with the Alder Lake-P series, followed by the Alder Lake-M for ultra-low power devices.

The top-of-the-range chip is the Core i9-12900K, with eight cores and 16 threads. It is fast—a test using AshesofSingularity gave the blue team around a 20 percent lead over AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900X—and Intel has released a desktop processor to ruffle AMD’s feathers. Intel’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, claims that Alder Lake marks the end of AMD’s dominance in the performance processor market. We are preparing to be suitably impressed.

AMD knew this was coming, and before we get to Zen 4 there will be the Zen 3 V-Cache, essentially using a chip-stacking process to slap 64MB of L3 cache on top of the processor cores, giving an expected performance bump of 15 to 20 percent. The launch date looks unlikely before the new year, but next month, we’ll see if Intel has earned the desktop gaming crown back.