Intel's Next-Gen 16-core/32-thread Alder Lake Processor appears online and sporting a new "Hybrid Chip Layout / Design"

[Jet_ski]

Without knowing the price it’s like whatever, who cares.
 

New CPUs with a mix of powerful and “weaker” cores is useful in desktops for computations/tasks that GPUs are currently doing. The only reason GPUs are faster in certain tasks is that they have many “weaker” cores. And Intel wants to fight that trend by improving their CPU performance in those areas.

[porina]

21 minutes ago, Unixsystem said:

I'm specifically referring to Alder Lake. I may have misinterpreted, but I was under the impression that Alder was still monolithic. 

They haven't said anything either way that I'm aware of specifically for Alder Lake, but they have been saying they want to modularise their CPU offerings more going forward. Might be worth a re-check of the Intel Architecture Day info dump they did about a month or so back.

[S w a t s o n]

Just here to point out that it's probably a 24 thread CPU as the atom cores are not expected to implement SMT for efficiency reasons, this was probably unable to properly detect the heterogeneous processor core regime in use. Just like no avx on those atom cores.

 

Also for anyone wondering: AMD will also go big.LITTLE eventually I'm sure as well but not before Zen4, could be Zen 5 even.

 

Edit: Actually in the OP screenshots you can see that the Capacity is a maximum of 24T on all of the runs. So this is basically confirmed

[Chett_Manly]

With how performance varies per CCX, I wonder if this wont end up being good for Ryzen as Intel will have to push Windows to better understand core performance characteristics and how to use them optimally.

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

I see this as an attack on Apple Silicon.

 

For me, this has no purpose on a desktop, where people really don't care about power usage. But on a laptop, they need to adopt heterogenous core configurations if they want to stay competitive with the new Macs with Apple Silicon which will smoke their Intel predecessors in efficiency and power usage.

[Kisai]

On 10/7/2020 at 12:36 AM, porina said:

Configuration options were leaked months ago. I'm still not sure I understand the value of "slow" cores on desktop in addition to "fast" cores. I think this is mainly a cheap way to increase core counts above 8 for mainstream.

IMO, look at it differently .

 

When your computer is asleep, what does it do in the background?

 

Multimedia stuff like Audio (non-DSP) hasn’t needed a high end CPU core since 1999. Video is done on GPU video cores, not typically in software, and if you do it in software you need a ^2 number of cores to synchronize. So if you can synchronize just the highspeed core for watching the video and the low speed cores for the audio, you may come out ahead.

 

But for games, this is just walking backwards in most cases. I see more AI-compute tech in the future and it typically makes more use of big-memory, parallel cores.(One Text-to-Speech Project Requires 5GB of VRAM on the GPU to use it.) This isn’t useful for that specific task.