Intel Announces New 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs for Desktops and Laptops

Aug. 20, 2021

Afterunveiling its first high-performance Arc gaming GPUsearlier this week, Intel has announced its new 12th-gen Core CPU lineup at its Architecture Day presentation today. The new CPU line iscodenamed Alder Lakeand will be the first set of Intel chips to feature a combination of high-performance and low-power cores.

The new Alder Lake CPUs, as per Intel, will be manufactured using the company’s 7nm architecture and will pack Performance as well as Efficiency Cores. Intel referred to the Performance Cores as P Cores and the Efficiency Cores as E Cores.

Now, the P Cores will be based on the “Golden Clove” architecture, while the E Cores will be based on “Gracemont” architecture. In the case of the Gracemont-based cores, Intel took a different approach with a physical silicone size and throughput efficiency to deliver multi-threaded performance to a significant number of individual cores. The P Cores, on the other hand, will be designed for speed and low latency.

Moreover, Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs will support Advanced Matrix Extensions for accelerating deep learning training and inference. Intel is calling thisthe highest-performance core it has ever built. The company also added that when the P and the E Cores are combined in the new Alder Lake processors, it can be highly scalable, delivering from 9W to up to 125W of power. Plus, the new CPUs will be able to manage 100Gbps of computing fabric per P core or a cluster of 4 E cores for a total of 1000Gbps between 10 units.

Furthermore, the new Intel CPUs for desktops will support DDR5 RAM, PCIe storage, Wi-Fi 6e, and Thunderbolt 4 ports. It will alsopack an integrated GPUthat will have up to 32 execution units for delivering basic display output and graphics performance. The CPUs will support up to DDR5-4800, LPDDR5-5200, DDR4-3200, and LPDDR4x-4266 RAMs.

Other than this, Intel also announced two mobile processors under the new Alder Lake lineup. One of these will feature 6 P cores and 8 E cores, and the other one will have an ultra-compact design with only 2 P cores and 8 E cores. Both of the CPUs will come with an integrated GPU with 96 execution units and built-in Thunderbolt controllers.

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