Intel Alder Lake Preview – Introduction

This fall, we’re going to see the biggest breakthrough in x86 architecture of this decade. At least that is what Intel says through former chief architect Raja Koduri. At the annual Intel Architecture Day, Koduri and several other Intel technical staff gave a preview of several chips that will hit the market in the coming year. Tweakers was there.

With his bold statement, Koduri was referring to the Intel Alder Lake processors, which should see the light of day later this year. After Intel said goodbye to the old Skylake architecture for its desktop CPUs earlier this year, Alder Lake also did the same with the gray-scaled 14nm process. In addition to a new process, in the form of Intel 7However, Alder Lake also brings two new types of cores. Two new types, as Alder Lake is also the first Intel processor for mainstream laptops and desktops to use what Intel calls a Hybrid CPU Architecture.

In this article we look at the hybrid CPU concept with all its consequences, after which we take a closer look at the two new microarchitectures that Intel has unveiled. Next we take a look at the platform and soc section of Alder Lake.

In addition to the information about Alder Lake, Intel released more details about the Xe graphics cards for gaming and data centers, including a roadmap for at least four future generations of the GPU architecture. Intel also introduces its own counterpart for Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR. We also look at Intel’s upcoming server processors codenamed Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio, an ultimate data center GPU that will consist of more than 100 billion transistors in total.