Twitter tech detective Tum Apisak has unearthed an Intel Alder Lake-S CPU listing within the SiSoft Sandra benchmarks results database. To make sure you are up to speed, Alder Lake-S will be Intel's 12th gen desktop processors, following the 11th gen Rocket Lake-S which is due in the coming months, and will be the first to be designed as a hybrid CPUs, so it is very interesting to see evidence of them being tested at this early stage.
The SiSoft Sandra entry provides some interesting clues, but in other ways confounds expectations. However, one might expect a certain amount of data misreporting in tools like Sandra where processors are extremely new and different.
Form the results listing the Intel Alder Lake-S hybrid desktop CPU appears to have the following key qualities:
- 16 cores and 32 threads
- 1.38GHz clock speed
- 10x 1.25MB L2 caches, 30MB L3 cache
Intel confirmed that it was advancing to a hybrid architecture for Alder Lake during its Architecture Day 2020 webcast in August. Thus we expect the 16C Alder Lake-S in the SiSoft Sandra result to feature a mix of eight 'big' high-performance cores, and eight 'small' high-efficiency cores. These will be speedy Golden Cove (big) and low power Gracemont (small) cores, respectively. Sandra sometimes lists this CPU as a 24T part - this indicates that the Gracemont cores don't offer Hyperthreading.
Looking at the cache amounts it seems common to speculate that the eight big cores will get 1.25MB L2 cache each, while the small cores will be clustered and share caches.
Other platform features which are expected to arrive with Alder Lake-S and its LGA 1700 socket platform are; DDR5 RAM support, and PCIe 5.0 support. These features are not evidenced in the SiSoft Sandra records at this time.
Sources: Tum Apisak, TechPowerUp, VideoCardz
