12th Gen Intel Core Alder Lake-S reportedly coming in September 2021
The 11th Gen Intel Core Rocket Lake processors have yet to land, but the next-gen processors is already on their way. Uniko’s Hardware has revealed that Intel might be taking the wraps off the 12th Gen Intel Core Alder Lake-S processors as early as September 2021. Intel has previously announced that it is coming in the H2 2021, so this timeline does seem pretty plausible.
September!
Intel 12th series CPU
600 chipset motherboard pic.twitter.com/EnFI0kZG4J— Uniko’s Hardware (@unikoshardware) January 23, 2021
Intel has revealed at CES 2021 that the 12th Gen Intel Core Alder Lake-S desktop processors will be the first 10nm desktop processors, aside from being the first to make use of the enhanced 10nm SuperFin process from Intel. With the upcoming 11th Gen Intel Core processors still manufactured on the ageing 14nm process node, it would be quite refreshing to see 10nm used for the desktop platform.
On top of the new process node, Alder Lake is expected to bring an all-new architecture and core arrangement to desktop and mobiles alike. Instead of your regular desktop processors today which come with the same architecture across all cores, Intel will be taking a page out of Arm’s big.LITTLE approach with Alder Lake.
It will be similar to the Intel Hybrid Technology that they introduced with the Lakefield mobile processors, with a mix of performance and efficiency cores. Understandably, there will be more performance and efficiency cores, with up to 16-core configurations previously leaked. Why would it be relevant in a desktop eludes me, but I guess it will be interesting to see how will Intel take advantage of it.
Given the stark differences from current-gen processors, Intel will also understandably require users to change their motherboards to one with the new LGA1700 socket and the Intel 600-series chipset. 12th Gen Intel Core Alder Lake-S is also expected to bring DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support, so I guess most enthusiasts won’t really mind changing their boards this time around.
Pokdepinion: With processors todays being designed to turn off cores when they are not utilized, I wonder how much power savings can the new efficiency cores bring to the table…
