Intel 16-core Alder Lake-S parts to bring big.LITTLE to desktops?

While Intel has yet to debut the 10th Gen Comet Lake-S series of desktop processors officially, there are leak floating around regarding the 12th Gen Intel Core desktop processors. it’s expected to be a pretty large processor with up to 16 cores, but what’s interesting is how the cores are configured. Intel is reportedly going to serve up a big.LITTLE arrangement for the 12th Gen Intel Core “Alder Lake-S” processors.

According to the leak, the Alder Lake S processors will require a new LGA1700 socket, and will come in various configurations including a six-core part with no small cores. The leak shows that Intel has targeted a TDP of 125W for the higher-end part while also exploring scaling up to 150W TDP, while the other two parts will sport 80W TDPs, pretty much in-line with what we have today.

Aside from this fancy new big-small core configuration, Alder Lake-S is also expected to be the first generation to bring support for PCIe 4.0 and also DDR5. It is also expected to be manufactured on Intel’s 10nm process too. None of these are confirmed though so you might want to take all this with a pinch of salt.

Arm’s big.LITTLE architecture has proven very effective for mobile implementations, allowing chipmakers to design processors that are capable of impressive single-core performance yet offer great efficiency by having “performance” and “efficiency” cores. I do believe such a configuration would probably make more sense in the laptop, but I won’t be too surprised when an Alder Lake-H or something along those lines appears online, using the same architecture, but for laptops.

Pokdepinion: Well if the cores can come together to deliver strong multi-core performance for taxing workloads while still offering great efficiency when puttering around the desktop, I don’t see why not.