THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
AS WE WRITE, the official launch of Intel’s Alder Lake-S chips is within sight. Alder Lake is a 12th-generation chip employing a new LGA 1700 socket, so new boards are required. It’s a hybrid architecture, mixing Golden Cove cores for power, and Gracemont cores for efficiency. Each Golden Cove core gets 1.25MB of L2 cache and there’s up to 30MB of shared L3 cache, DDR5 support, and PCIe 5.0 lanes. Next year, it will reach laptops, with the Alder Lake-P series, followed by the Alder Lake-M for ultra-low power devices.