INTEL’S CHIP development might feel as if it has stalled a little compared with AMD’s blistering development cycle, but the blue team hasn’t been idle, and rumors about the forthcoming 12th generation Alder Lake chips have been coming thick and fast. After what seems like far too long, Intel will soon have something genuinely innovative.
Alder Lake will be a hybrid processor, combining Golden Cove cores for performance, and Gracemont cores for efficiency, with up to eight of each. It will use an LGA1700 s o c k e t w i t h D D R 5 , and PCIe 5.0 support, but the accompanying chipset is unlikely to feature PCIe 5.0. What you plug into your PCIe 5.0 bus is another matter, there won’t be any PCIe 5.0 SSD drives until later next year, and we’ve yet to see a consumer graphics card that can benefit from PCIe 4.0, let alone 5.0.