The company revealed prices and performance for three of its forthcoming chips.
Intel has officially announced details on its much-anticipated 12th-gen Alder Lake processors, including pricing and performance details for three new chips. The good news: While Intel’s 11th-gen processors weren’t particularly innovative or exciting or…differently-shaped, the 12th-gen processors are very different. They’re built with the Intel 7 process and are the first processors to utilize Intel’s new-ish hybrid architecture—and yes, the different architecture means you’ll need a new Z690 motherboard to upgrade. Intel’s latest hybrid architecture mixes different cores on the same chip: Big, high-powered performance cores (P-cores) and small, low-powered efficient cores (E-cores). This type of hybrid architecture isn’t totally new—we saw its predecessor in Intel’s Lakefield processors—but it’s coupled with a hardware-based optimization tool called Intel Thread Director, which streamlines performance by directing tasks to the correct cores: P-cores handle the powerful, single-threaded tasks, while E-cores take care of background processes and multi-tasking.
