THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

THE GLOVES ARE OFF and Intel has deployed what is arguably its biggest and most ambitious CPU architecture overhaul. Its Alder Lake, 12th-Gen Core processors include major enhancements to improve performance and efficiency, with Intel’s first 10nm class (now Intel 7) process technology in a desktop chip. With two new CPU architectures, Golden Cove and Gracemont, this will be the foundation of the next generations of mobile, desktop, and data center processors.

For the past seven years, Intel has watched its processor leadership deteriorate. AMD’s Zen 3 architecture boasts high core counts, high instructions per cycle (IPC), high clocks, and efficiency, thanks to a manufacturing process at least a generation ahead of Intel’s 14nm parts.

Alder Lake aims to change all that. Intel now offers a legitimate 16-core CPU for consumers, and it can go toe-to-toe with AMD’s 16-core offering. What’s more, in workloads that don’t scale well with raw thread counts (for example, gaming), Intel has focused on boosting IPC while maintaining clock speeds of more than 5GHz. Alder Lake provides Intel with a 19 percent boost to IPC on average while using less power than the previous generation Comet Lake. It’s about time we had a compelling upgrade to Intel’s desktop offerings, which had stagnated.

We’ve reviewed the new Core i9-12900K (MPC198) and provided an overview of Intel’s various ‘Lake’ processor families (MPC192). We know Alder Lake performs well in the right situations—such as on Windows 11—but let’s dig deeper into the architectures and software that power this new and improved Death Star. Watch out for that thermal exhaust port.

SIX YEARS OF INCREASING POWER

To put it bluntly, Alder Lake and many of its underlying technologies are arriving incredibly late to the party. Intel’s first 14nm chips, the Broadwell architecture and 5th Gen Core launched in 2015. Broadwell was mostly a die shrink of the previous generation Haswell chips, combined with a large 128MB eDRAM cache inside the CPU package. Broadwell was also late, which is why the desktop version was almost entirely ignored, but Skylake came out just a few months later as the second iteration of 14nm.

That was the last time Intel officially moved