The Empire Strikes Back

"We take a closer look at Intel’s new Alder Lake CPUs"

- By Jarrod Walton

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.