Intel provided a sneak peak of some of the changes that will come together in its new chips, starting with the Alder Lake Series that comes out later this year.
Instead of being the next generation of the powerful CPU cores, Alder Lake will feature the company’s latest hybrid architecture and offer a mix of performance and efficiency x86 cores. Intel preview both as part of its announcements on Architecture Day 2021.
Alder Lake will be Intel’s first chip to be released on the newly renamed Intel 7 technology node, which uses technology similar to the current 10nm tech.
The new x86 performance core, which has been codenamed “Golden Cove”, will succeed the Willow Cove cores currently found in the 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors. Intel says it is its most-powerful ever CPU core, but it only offered a comparison to the Cypress Cove cores.
With the new x86 Efficient core, which has been codenamed “Gracemont”, Intel aims to have the most efficient x86 CPU core in the world, while still offering IPC higher than the Skylake chips. Intel claims that one of its new “efficient” cores offers 40 per cent higher performance at the same power of a Skylake core for single-thread cases. These improvements are doubled when compared with four Efficient cores running four threads to two four-threaded Skylake cores.
The Verve reported broadly, the “performance” cores are the ones featured in Core-class processors, while the “efficiency” cores are similar to Intel’s Atom-class processors. While each of the new architectures are interesting on their own, Intel wants to combine them in a hybrid architecture as a core product, starting with the Alder Lake chips.
Intel has attempted to make hybrid architectures before, with last year’s Lakefield chips. Those models, however, offered one Sunny Cove performance core and four low-powered Tremont efficiency cores and came with a handful lower-powered devices such as the ThinkPad X1 Fold.
Intel, however, wants to be far more ambitious with the Alder Lake chips. It teased a range of chips — from 9W to 125W — which would utilise the hybrid approach and combine several high-end performance cores with efficient cores for a wide range of power.
