A purportedly leaked document is circulating which may be evidence of Intel's intentions to bring its hybrid CPU designed Foveros packaged chips to the desktop. The big news is that the 12th Gen Alder Lake-S will apparently be the first Intel hybrid processor line for desktops and it will boast up to 8+8 big.LITTLE core configurations plus Xe graphics.
While Intel's Lakefield hybrid mobile computing chips use one 'big' 10nm Sunny Cove core plus four 'LITTLE' Tremont cores for power efficient computing, understandably things are being scaled up for desktops and Alder Lake-S will be a generation ahead too. Thus we are looking at Alder Lake-S processors coming packing up to eight Golden Cove cores, with a power efficient octet of Gracemont cores available for backup - that's 16 physical cores in total.
As well as activating for more demanding tasks the big cores may come into play when the following instruction sets are required by an application; AVX-512, Intel TSX-NI, or FP16 support.
Another part of the purported documentation shows a product table with a 125W Alder Lake processor. This LGA 1700 chip features 8+8+1 configuration where the latter number seems to be reference to GT1, an integrated Xe GPU. The next product seems to offer the same config at a lower TDP (80W) so that could be a clock locked processor. Lastly Intel looks like it will offer some no-hybrid CPUs in the Alder Lake family, like a product with just 6 big cores and GT1.
Twitter user Retired Engineer graciously translated some further comments about Alder Lake-S from ChipHell, sharing the following important points:
- LGA 1700 is rumoured to be a long-life platform which will last through three generations
- LGA 1700 may support PCIe 5.0 in the future but DDR5 support on the platform isn't certain
- Gracemont LITTLE cores will feature support for some of the AVX-512 instruction set
The 10nm Alder Lake-S line is still some way from reaching consumers. We still have to wait for the 11th gen Intel Core Rocket Lake-S processors to come and go. Rocket Lake-S will use the same LGA 1200 socket as Comet Lake-S.
Additional sources: VideoCardz, TechPowerUp, Zhihu forums
