Intel Alder Lake will be a hybrid architecture, Intel confirms The next generation of client processor architectures, expected to arrive in both mobile and desktop in late 2021, will be a combination of two CPU architectures: Golden Cove and Gracemont. The aim is to provide an efficient answer to both high-performance and core-intensive processing for gaming and productivity tasks. In essence, this is Intel's answer to AMD Ryzen's high core count chips.

Alder Lake has long been rumored to take a hybrid approach, but was only confirmed during Intel's latest Architecture Day 2020. [This is because hybrid architectures have typically been used in battery-dependent mobile devices, at least in their early days. Modern laptops, for example, require both performance when needed and excellent battery life. This requires a highly efficient processor, and one way to build such a chip is to use both low-power and high-power cores.

At the core of the hybrid architecture is the idea that the low-power cores do as much work as possible at high efficiency. When a core becomes overloaded and literally cannot handle the workload, its threads are migrated to the high-performance cores. These high-performance cores may be less efficient, but they are faster, more powerful, and only turn on when needed. [Thus, a more power-efficient chip is created.

This is the approach Intel previously used with its Lakefield chips. This mobile-specific architecture consists of only one Sunny Cove Core core and four low-power Atom cores, and does not include HyperThreading. patent application does not make much sense. [However, such hybrid architectures are typically seen under Arm's big.LITTLE brand.

And therein lies the reason for Intel's decision (confirmed during Intel's Q2 earnings call) to bring hybrid architectures to the desktop: eight Golden Cove and eight Gracemont configurations, for 16 cores per chip. While this can be claimed, power efficiency will have little impact on a wired-up desktop machine.

However, Intel has said that Alder Lake, at least on desktops, is tuned purely for performance.

"Lakefield was tuned for battery life, but with Alder Lake we're focusing on performance and making significant advances in hybrid architecture. We are working on a next-generation hardware-guided scheduler that is optimized for performance and seamlessly leverages all cores; Alder Lake will not only be superior in performance, it will be the best performance/watt architecture."

Efficiency is more important than battery life. It also means smaller coolers and less wasted energy. This is something I can absolutely get behind. This move should also mean that Intel can refine the single-core prowess and clock speeds of its high-power cores while maintaining reasonable power consumption for multi-threaded workloads.

The anticipated move to eight Golden Cove cores also means that Intel will cut two high-performance cores out of the current total of 10 cores in the upper Comet Lake chips. These will be at least 10nm cores, presumably with a larger instruction per clock (IPC) than the outmoded Skylake microarchitecture.

It is definitely an innovative and risky move on Intel's part, as AMD opted for a chiplet architecture with Ryzen and achieved great results in terms of both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance and price. Intel is considering a different approach, but if they succeed, they will be able to compete across the board. To do so, they need to make the passing of threads between cores per workload seamless for the entire system and software.

It will soon be clear how Alder Lake, expected to be released in late 2021, will stack up against the current best CPUs for gaming and AMD's Zen 3 lot.