[Hardware] Intel 12th-Gen Alder Lake Release Date, Benchmarks, Specifications, and All We Know

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https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-alder-lake-specifications-price-benchmarks-release-date

Intel's 12th-Gen Alder Lake chip will bring the company's hybrid architecture, which combines a mix of larger high-performance cores paired with smaller high-efficiency cores, to desktop x86 PCs for the first time. Intel has shared many of the architectural details at its Architecture Day 2021, but left out the key details, like pricing and specific models. As per usual, most of the information, including pricing, chip configurations and benchmarks, has leaked through retailer postings and benchmark utilities with online databases. We'll cover all of those details below.

Alder Lake represents a massive strategic shift as Intel looks to regain the uncontested performance lead against AMD's Ryzen 5000 series processors. AMD's Zen 3 architecture has taken the lead in our Best CPUs for gaming and CPU Benchmarks hierarchy, partly on the strength of Ryzen's higher core counts. That's not to mention the pressure from Apple's M1 processors that feature a similar hybrid design to Alder Lake and come with explosive single-threaded performance improvements of their own.

Intel's Alder Lake brings disruptive new architectures and supports features like PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 that leapfrog AMD and Apple in connectivity technology and also outstrip Ryzen's core counts in mobile designs.

It all starts with a new way of thinking for x86 chips by pairing high-performance and high-efficiency cores within a single chip. That well-traveled design philosophy powers billions of Arm chips, often referred to as Big.Little (Intel calls its implementation Big-Bigger), but it's a first for x86 desktop PCs. The Golden Cove architecture powers Alder Lake's 'big' high-performance cores, while the 'little' Atom efficiency cores come with the Gracemont architecture. Intel will etch the cores on its 'Intel 7' Enhanced SuperFin process, marking the company's first truly new node for the desktop since 14nm debuted six long years ago.

Intel is going all-in: the company will reunify its desktop and mobile lines with Alder Lake. Intel says it will tune Alder Lake for high-performance, a must for desktop PCs and high-end notebooks. There are also signs that some models will come with only the big cores active, which should perform exceedingly well in gaming.
Potent adversaries challenge Intel on both sides. Apple's Arm-powered M1 processors have set a high bar for hybrid designs, outperforming all other processors in their class with the promise of more powerful designs to come. Meanwhile, AMD's Ryzen 5000 chips have taken the lead over Intel's aging Skylake derivatives. Intel's Rocket Lake chips overtook AMD in single-threaded performance, but they still trail in multi-core workloads due to Rocket Lake's maximum of eight cores, while AMD has 16-core models for the mainstream desktop.

Intel certainly needs a come-from-behind design to thoroughly unseat its competitors, swinging the tables back in its favor like the Conroe chips did back in 2006 when the Core architecture debuted with a ~40% performance advantage that cemented Intel's dominance for a decade. Intel's Raja Koduri has already likened the transition to Alder Lake with the debut of Core, suggesting that Alder Lake could indeed be a Conroe-esque moment.

While Intel hasn't shared many of the details on the new chip, plenty of unofficial details have come to light over the last few months, giving us a broad indication of Intel's vision for the future. Let's dive in.
Intel's 12th-Gen Alder Lake At a Glance

    Alder Lake comes to market in Fall 2021
    LGA1700 socket requires new motherboards
    The Alder Lake SoC will span from desktop PCs to ultramobile devices with TDP ratings from 9W to 125W, all built on the Intel 7 process. The desktop PC comes with up to eight Performance (P) cores and eight Efficient (E) cores for a total of 16 cores and 24 threads and up to 30 MB of L3 cache for a single chip.
    Alder Lake supports either DDR4 or DDR5 (LP4x/LP5, too). Desktop PC supports x16 PCIe Gen 5 and x4 PCIe Gen 4, while mobile supports x12 PCIe Gen 4 and x16 PCIe Gen 3, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 6E.
    Intel's new hyper-threaded Performance (P) core, which comes with the Golden Cove microarchitecture designed for low-latency single-threaded performance, comes with an average of 19% more IPC than the Cypress Cove architecture in Rocket Lake. It also supports AVX-512 and AMX (a new AI-focused matrix-multiply ISA) for data center variants (both are disabled on consumer chips).
    Intel's new single-threaded Efficiency (E) core comes with the Gracemont microarchitecture to improve multi-threaded performance and provide exceptional area efficiency (small footprint) and performance-per-watt. Four small cores fit in the same area as a Skylake core and deliver 80% more performance in threaded work (at the same power). A single E core also delivers 40% more performance than a single-threaded Skylake core (at the same power) in single-threaded work (caveats apply to both).
    Intel's Thread Director is a hardware-based technology that assures threads are assigned to either the P or E cores in an optimized manner. This is the sleeper tech that enables the hybrid architecture.
    Alder Lake does not support AVX-512 under any condition (fused off in P cores, not supported in E cores) to ensure an even ISA application.
    Four variants: -S for desktop PCs, -P for mobile, -M for low-power devices, -L Atom replacement, -N educational (probably Chromebooks)
    Intel will hold the inaugural Intel Innovation event October 27-28. The event is largely thought to be the official unveiling of the Alder Lake processor stack.   

Intel Alder Lake Release Date

Alder Lake will arrive in Fall 2021, meaning the official launch is just around the corner. Given the slew of benchmark submissions, retailer listings, pictures of the chips, and operating system patches we've seen, final qualification samples are obviously already in the hands of OEMs and various ecosystem partners.