We take a closer look at Intel’s
new Alder Lake CPUs BY JARROD WALTON
THE GLOVES ARE OFF and Intel has deployed what
is arguably its biggest and most ambitious CPU
architecture overhaul. Its Alder Lake, 12th-Gen
Core processors include major enhancements
to improve performance and efficiency, with
Intel’s first 10nm class (now Intel 7) process
technology in a desktop chip. With two new CPU
architectures, Golden Cove and Gracemont, this
will be the foundation of the next generations
of mobile, desktop, and data center processors.
For the past seven years, Intel has watched
its processor leadership deteriorate. AMD’s Zen
3 architecture boasts high core counts, high
instructions per cycle (IPC), high clocks, and
efficiency, thanks to a manufacturing process
at least a generation ahead of Intel’s 14nm parts.
Alder Lake aims to change all that. Intel now
offers a legitimate 16-core CPU for consumers,
and it can go toe-to-toe with AMD’s 16-core
offering. What’s more, in workloads that don’t
scale well with raw thread counts (for example,
gaming), Intel has focused on boosting IPC while
maintaining clock speeds of more than 5GHz.
Alder Lake provides Intel with a 19 percent
boost to IPC on average while using less power
than the previous generation Comet Lake. It’s
about time we had a compelling upgrade to
Intel’s desktop offerings, which had stagnated.
We’ve reviewed the new Core i9-12900K
(MPC198) and provided an overview of Intel’s
various ‘Lake’ processor families (MPC192). We
know Alder Lake performs well in the right
situations—such as on Windows 11—but let’s
dig deeper into the architectures and software
that power this new and improved Death Star.
Watch out for that thermal exhaust port.THE
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