The first photo, purportedly of Intel's new hybrid Alder Lake-S processor, was posted by VideoCardz. It certainly looks the part. There are said to be 1,700 contact pads on the back, which would match the description of the brand new LGA 1700 socket that is often leaked with Intel's new hybrid chip designs coming in 2021.

Alder Lake represents a departure from Intel's regular programming. Both chip architectures will be manufactured on the new 10nm process and feature two discrete architectures, Golden Cove and Gracemont. [Golden Cove is an evolution of the architecture in the Tiger Lake 11th generation processors announced in September and available now; Gracemont is built on the low-power architecture most commonly used in Atom chips. Alder Lake-S processors combine eight (large) Golden Cove cores with eight (small) Gracemont cores.

Alder Lake has already been found in tests on popular benchmark databases. [In particular, it utilizes a much larger footprint than existing LGA 1200 socket processors such as Intel Comet Lake and Intel Core i9 10900K. Currently, the LGA 1700 socket is almost finalized.

This is still an engineering sample and may not be the final design. Therefore, it may be best not to look too closely at the placement of the capacitors on the underside of the chip.

The big question for Intel Alder Lake is whether eight high-performance cores and eight low-power cores can meet ten high-performance cores for gaming and other demanding workloads. Intel believes that the hybrid approach is worth more than just battery life.

Intel Alder Lake will not be available until late 2021. Before that, the Intel Rocket Lake processor, aimed squarely at AMD's Ryzen 5000 processor, which will appear on November 5, will be available in the first few months of this year.