Intel’s 12th generation processor promises to be a big leap for the company as they try their hand at the hybrid architecture pioneered by ARM.
Hot on the heels of 11th-gen Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake processors, Big Blue is bringing it all together later this year with the Intel Alder Lake series of processors, based on the high-efficiency big. LITTLE hybrid design pioneered by the British semiconductor firm Arm. It seems that big. LITTLE is all the rage right now, thanks largely to the huge success of the Apple M1 chip, which replaced Intel’s own silicon in last year’s Apple MacBook Air,13-inch Apple MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini, and soon to be released in Apple’s new iMac. Apple is so committed to their new silicon that we’re already hearing rumors about the next-generation Apple MX chip that might be powering Apple’s more powerful 16-inch MacBook Pro later this year. It’s little wonder then that Intel is making its own MX rival, based on the same architecture as Apple’s silicon first developed by Arm. This design, known primarily as big. LITTLE but also as «hybrid» architecture, features a mix of low-power, high efficiency, single-thread cores to handle low urgency background tasks and more traditional dual-thread, high performance cores to handle heavy workloads. While a very popular design for low power mobile devices for more than a decade, big. LITTLE processors haven’t had enough power to tackle the most demanding apps on the market like Adobe Creative Suite, but that is changing fast, with the Apple M1 chip showing the kind of performance the design is capable of when powering traditional desktop workloads. It’s no wonder that we’re excited to see what Intel will be able to do with the new architecture. It’s a major step for Intel, who is used to using its own design for decades now, and after some stumbles in recent years and its losing ground to AMD, a change is definitely warranted. So what do we know about Intel Alder Lake, the first major overhaul of an Intel processor generation in as long as anyone can remember? Early rumors are promising, and we’re here to tell you everything we know from expected release date to clock speeds to what we’ve seen from potential benchmark leaks. While an official release date hasn’t been given yet, Intel revealed during CES 2021 that it expected Alder Lake to arrive in the second half of 2021, while the company’s former CEO, Bob Swan, saying that «[Intel] will qualify Alder Lake desktop and notebook for production and begin our volume ramp in the second half of 2021.
