Intel Alder Lake-S 12th Gen Hybrid Desktop CPU Pictured For First Time

by Brandon Hill — Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 04:07 PM EDT

Over the next few months, all eyes will be on Intel's upcoming 11^th generation Comet Lake-S desktop processors, which will supplant the current 10^th generation Comet Lake-S family. While still being based on the 14nm process node, Rocket Lake-S will bring support for PCIe 4.0, Thunderbolt 4, along with higher clocks (and IPC) and more performance to the table.

But looking past Comet Lake-S, there's the 12^th generation Alder Lake-S architecture. We've talked about it quite a bit in recent months here at HotHardware, and now we're getting our first [alleged] look at an Alder Lake-S CPU. The image comes to us from Videocardz, which shows the processor side-by-side with Comet Lake-S.

While Comet Lake-S uses the LGA-1200 socket and measures 37.5mm x 37.5mm, Alder Lake-S uses the new LGA-1700 socket and has a more rectangular package shape (37.5mm x 45mm). As you can tell from the image above, Alder Lake-S will necessitate a completely different socket/motherboard, meaning that LGA-1200 will have only lived for two generations.

Alder Lake-S will be a hybrid CPU architecture, with Golden Cove performance cores and Gracemont efficiency cores. Intel has dabbled with this hybrid setup with mobile-centric Lakefield, but this will be the first time that we'll see this extend to the desktop market. We've recently seen alleged benchmark entries for an Alder Lake-S processor with a total of 16 cores and 32 threads. This particular processor was backed with 30MB L3 cache while featuring a clock speed of 1.4GHz.

It's expected the Alder Lake-S will support DDR5 memory along with the PCIe 5.0 interface, and would likely be going head-to-head with AMD's [expected and obviously unannounced] Zen 4-based Ryzen 6000 processor family.

Tags: Intel, (NASDAQ:INTC), alder lake, alder lake-s, lga 1700

Brandon Hill

Brandon received his first PC, an IBM Aptiva 310, in 1994 and hasn’t looked back since. He cut his teeth on computer building/repair working at a mom and pop computer shop as a plucky teen in the mid 90s and went on to join AnandTech as the Senior News Editor in 1999. Brandon would later help to form DailyTech where he served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008 until 2014. Brandon is a tech geek at heart, and family members always know where to turn when they need free tech support. When he isn’t writing about the tech hardware or studying up on the latest in mobile gadgets, you’ll find him browsing forums that cater to his long-running passion: automobiles.

Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.