Intel Is Going After AMD with With 12th Gen Alder Lake big.LITTLE CPUs

• On paper, Intel Alder Lake will beat current AMD 5000 series Ryzen CPUs at gaming and productivity.
• Intel is finally coming back at AMD with 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs for desktop.
• These new processors are following into Apple’s M1 architecture, featuring fast cores and efficient cores.

As a consumer, I’m happy there’s real competition in the CPU sector. Not long ago, in 2017 we were all using quad-core CPUs thanks to Intel, who was unchallenged by AMD, thus not willing to push the bar forward too far.

As a Ryzen 5800X owner, I’m not that happy if the 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs freshly announced by Intel will be as fast as claimed. Buyer’s remorse I guess.

What’s New With Alder Lake?

By far the most important change is the new big.LITTLE architecture, which is an important departure from what AMD and Intel have built until today. Instead of featuring multiple identical CPU cores, Alder Lake is now using up to 8 fast, performance cores, named P-cores, and up to 8 slow, efficient cores, named E-cores.

This new architecture will allow background processes to run on the efficient low-power cores, while foreground demanding apps will get the full attention of the P-cores, thus increasing performance while sipping less power.

At least that’s the story, and we’ll have to see in practice if Windows will be able to take advantage of the new CPUs.

This change is very similar to what Apple did with their M1 chips, but it’s not the same thing. Apple is using the ARM architecture, the same used by chips in mobile phones, with a low number of instructions (RISC), while Intel is still using an architecture with a big number of instructions (CISC), just like AMD.

Also, Intel doesn’t integrate the RAM memory on the same chip. You will still buy and install RAM separately. But this time you will get the chance to try the new DDR5 memory, or, depending on the motherboard you will still use DDR4. Alder Lake is compatible with both.

For now, DDR5 doesn’t look that interesting, since it will be slower and more expensive than DDR4, but in a few years, it will be the better choice for sure.

Another novelty is the LGA 1700 socket. This means you’ll also need a new motherboard with the Z690 chipset. Older Intel CPUs won’t be compatible. You will need a new mounting system for your CPU cooler, but some manufacturers might release an upgrade kit. Noctua for example offers the kit for free to all customers who bought a cooler in the past.

The last novelty is the compatibility with the PCI-Express 5.0 standard. It’s weird how fast we’re jumping over PCI-Express 4.0, but that’s not a problem, since the new standard is backward compatible with the previous standards. Your older GPU and add-in cards will work just fine. Maybe the next generation of Nvidia and AMD GPUs will take advantage of the two-fold increase in bandwidth brought by PCI-E 5.0.

The 6 Alder Lake CPU Models Compared

In total there are 6 new models at lunch, two Core i5, two Core i7, and two Core i9 models, ranging from 10 cores up to 16 cores. Mind you that we’re talking about the total sum of the performance and efficiency cores.

Here’s a comparison table that sums up the six new models. You’ll see some novelties, like the core layout mentioned next to the number of cores, the frequency ranges for P and E-cores under both normal and Boost operation models, with corresponding power requirements.

All new models are unlocked, hence the letter K in the product name. Those which also feature the letter F are CPUs without integrated graphics.

It looks like the P cores are hyperthreaded, while the E cores are single-threaded. Also, the power requirements go up to 241 watts for the top two Core i9 models. That’s 100 watts more than the Ryzen 5800X 8-core CPU.

This increase in power consumption has something to do with the manufacturing process. Intel is finally ditching the 14 nm manufacturing node for Intel 7, basically a 10 nm Mode, but at the same time AMD already uses a 7 nm manufacturing process.

These nanometers are not comparable, they’re not the same thing, but help explain the difference in power consumption. Not all these extra 100 watts are being used for performance.

Anyway, the new CPUs will be in stores on November 4th, at the same time as the independent reviews. We’ll have to wait a few more days before drawing any conclusions, but Intel promises Alder Lake will be at least 19% faster than the 11th Gen CPUs in gaming, content creation, and production workloads.

I’m more curious how Intel Alder Lake will compare to AMD’s Ryzen 5000 family. Intel did show a slide during the official presentations, but it looks like they did the AMD comparison with a system that was running a Windows 11 without the patch that solves the Ryzen L3 Cache latency issue. Yeap, so we can’t draw any conclusions just yet.

Anyway, if you want to know more about the new Alder Lake architecture I recommend you read Anandtech’s article. It covers pretty much anything an enthusiast would want to know.

I can’t wait to see how the mobile versions of these CPUs will perform in Intel Evo laptops. I’m curious most about battery performance.

Ionuț-Alexandru Popa

I'm a writer and Editor-in-Chief at BinaryFork. I am passionate about technology, science, space exploration, and movies. I started writing about tech more than 20 years ago, after graduating in Computer Science.