Covering desktop, laptop, and ultra mobile form factors, Alder Lake processors will have cores optimised for lower power consumption while other cores are optimised for raw performance.
Intel has taken the wraps off its Alder Lake system-on-a-chip, which is the company’s first processor to incorporate its efficient and performance cores. Previously known as Gracemont, the efficient core in Alder Lake is designed to do what it says on the tin, with Intel saying in comparison to its late-2015 Skylake chips, efficient core was able to deliver 40% better single-threaded performance at the same power levels, and 80% better performance when comparing a 4-core 4-thread efficient core to a 2-core 4-thread Skylake core. With the new Intel 7 process, previously known as 10nm Enhanced Super Fin, Intel is able to fit four cores on the same die space of a Skylake core. Intel is boasting that the core will have more accurate branch prediction thanks to its 5,000 entry branch target cache, a 64KB instruction cache to „keep useful instructions close“. The core will also have Intel’s first on-demand instruction length decoder to generate pre-decode information, a clustered out-of-order decoder that can decode six instructions per cycle. The core also has 17 execution ports that include four integer ALUs, and can support up to 4MB of L2 cache. The Alder Lake performance core, previously known as Golden Cove, arrives with six decoders,12 execution ports, improved branch prediction, and quicker L1 cache. All up it performs around 19% better than the 11th generation Cypress Cove. To help with matrix multiplication, which is useful when handling machine learning workloads, Intel has introduced its advanced matrix extensions.
