What you need to know
- Intel has provided a preview of its new Alder Lake chip.
- It will feature scalable client architecture.
- It comes to consumers by way of the company's Intel 7 process.
We've heard a lot about Alder Lake in bits and pieces, be it via Intel itself when outlining products of the future or via third-party entities such as Noctua that are having to prepare for Alder Lake. But now, the chipmaker is giving an in-depth look at what we can all expect.
Firstly, we now know the chip is built on Intel's Intel 7 process, a rebrand of one of its existing processes outlined during the company's road-to-2025 timeline overview. It'll feature a scalable SoC architecture. Furthermore, it'll have industry-leading memory and I/O, according to Intel, which lists DDR5, PCIe Gen5, Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 6E as items representing where the chip is at on the tech spectrum.
Alder Lake will come equipped with up to 16 cores (eight for efficiency, eight for performance), 24 threads, and 30MB non-inclusive LL cache. As for what memory tech it supports, Intel claims it will work with all four big camps: DDR4, DDR5, LP5, and LP4x.
The aforementioned cores will utilize Intel's new x86 Performance and Efficient cores, which Intel is touting as the most powerful and efficient cores out there. A lofty claim for sure, though we'll see if it's true soon enough.
In the fabrics department, Alder Lake sports up to 1,000GB/s compute fabric, up to 64GB/s in I/O fabric, and up to 204GB/s in memory fabric. But wait, there's more.
Not only is all of this coming to Alder Lake, but Alder Lake is coming to you, the consumer, starting in the fall of 2021. If you're excited about Intel's future offerings and are keen on gearing up for the latest components, consider going with Noctua for your best CPU coolers since the company is ready for Alder Lake.
