There are plenty of new features coming with the Intel Alder Lake-S processors, which will arrive in November of this year. One of the most important changes will be the modular design, which combines Big Cores and Small Cores, among other innovations.
Intel Alder Lake-S will integrate PCIe 5.0, DDR5, and new heatsinks and will arrive in November
One of the big features of the new Intel Alder Lake-S is the use of two types of cores, some of the high efficiency as well as performance. It would be a solution between the AMD Ryzen design and the ARM big.LITTLE design. But these new processors will also be the first to support PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 technologies.
AMD is way ahead of Intel in terms of supporting the PCIe 4.0 interface, which was only present in the Rocket Lake-S. Only one generation of processors will support this interface, and its impact is minimal. It only brings higher read and writes speeds on M.2 NVMe drives, which are very expensive storage drives.
DDR5 is natively supported by Alder Lake-S, but DDR4 is also supported at the same time. Motherboards cannot support both DDR4 and DDR5 at the same time, so it will be up to assemblers to decide which RAM standard they support. It is possible that low-end and mid-range will only support DDR4 and high-end will only support DDR5, mainly because of the shortage of memory for the new standard.
It appears that Intel has confirmed to assemblers that Alder Lake-S will be released in November 2021. This date may vary depending on circumstances, as we assume 2020, a terrible year that leaves very noticeable hardware shortages.
We will also have a new socket design. The LGA1700 socket is rectangular in design, instead of the square as before. This means that users will not be able to reuse their heatsinks and will have to buy a new one. It is possible that the current heatsinks will not fit the new processors.
What do we know for sure about these new processors?
These new processors will be the first to be introduced for the desktop market under the 10nm SuperFIN node. This node has been optimized by the company to offer a big performance and efficiency leap over 14nm.
The new processors will be based on the LGA1700 socket, which is rumored to last several processor generations, just like the AM4 socket.
Another special feature is the design of the processor’s DIE. We will have a set of cores called Small Cores, which will be based on the Gracemont Atom architecture and will not have HyperThreading; they will take care of light tasks like browsing and office automation. Power will be provided by the Big Cores of the Golden Cove x86 architecture, which will support HyperThreading and will be enabled when the load increases, such as for games, AI, and the like.
These Alder Lake processors appear to support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, which will be a big jump in performance. It would also offer improvements in specific tasks like artificial intelligence or video encoding.