Intel Alder Lake-S 12th Gen Hybrid Desktop CPU Pictured For First Time
But looking past Comet Lake-S, there's the 12th 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.
