Intel Alder Lake-S CPU Reportedly Surfaces With 16 Cores, 32 Threads

[harlan4096]

Not the kind of cores that you're thinking of

Hardware sleuth @Tum_Apisak has discovered benchmark submissions for one of Intel's future Alder Lake-S processors. The new breed of hybrid chips will make their way to the market sometime in 2021.

Alder Lake-S is a new microarchitecture and a hybrid one, so SiSoftware might not properly detect the processor. There's plenty of evidence of that: The Alder Lake-S specimen reportedly arrives with 16 cores and 32 threads, but the software picked it up with 16 threads and 24 threads in certain benchmarks.

Since Intel has already shared Alder Lake-S's recipe with the hardware world, we know the 16-chip is comprised of Golden Cove and Gracemont cores. The core count aligns with one of the potential configurations for Alder Lake-S. Barring any changes, the 16-core Alder Lake-S sample should have eight Golden Cove cores and eight Gracemont cores.

SiSoftware lists the Alder Lake-S processor with a clock speed of 1.4 GHz, which we think is probably for the Gracemont cores. The chip also seems to feature 12.5MB of L2 cache and 30MB of L3 cache. The iGPU inside the Alder Lake-S comes equipped with 256 shader cores at 1.15 GHz and adheres to a previous submission that surfaced last month. Intel didn't indicate which graphics engine it will use for Alder Lake-S, but it's likely to be the Xe LP iGPU.

Benchmark Ryzen 5 3600 Alder Lake-S

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Processor Arithmetic 207.25 GOPS 224.74 GOPS
Processor Multi-Media 624.72 Mpix/s 438.26 Mpix/s
.NET Arithmetic 51.11 GOPS 69.66 GOPS
.NET Multi-Media 152.10 Mpix/s 50.97 Mpix/s

Processor Cryptography (High Security) 15.53 GB/s 6.72 GB/sOfficial documents from Intel itself have seemingly confirmed the usage of the new LGA1700 socket for Alder Lake-S. Although Intel hasn't said, many believe that Alder Lake-S will usher in DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support. The leaked engineering sample operates with DDR4, so it appears that Alder Lake-S could support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory modules. The Alder Lake-S processor was paired with Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4.0 SSD, but that doesn't tell us anything concrete about the interface.

It's too early to pass judgment on Alder Lake-S, and given its unique design, SiSoftware's benchmarks might not be optimized for the chip. Therefore, we recommend you take the Alder Lake-S results with a bit of salt. Furthermore, there are only a few Alder Lake-S results, which could skew the aggregated numbers. For what it's worth, the Alder Lake-S seems to beat the Ryzen 5 3600 in the Processor Arithmetic and .NET Arithmetic benchmarks.
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