Intel's Alder Lake Mobile Chips Will Feature Up to 14 Cores (6 + 8)

takyon writes:

Intel published a developer guide confirming details of its upcoming Alder Lake processors.

Desktop "Alder Lake-S" processors will include up to 8 "Golden Cove" performance cores (P-cores), 8 "Gracemont" (Atom) efficiency cores (E-cores), and 32 graphics execution units (Gen 12.2 EUs). A smaller die will include only up to 6 P-cores and no E-cores, to be used in lower-end products such as a 6-core Intel Core i5-12400 or a quad-core i3.

Mobile "Alder Lake-P" processors will include up to 6 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and 96 graphics EUs. A smaller "ultra mobile" die will include up to 2 P-cores and 8 E-cores.

AVX-512 is physically present on Golden Cove cores, but disabled in Alder Lake.

The guide mainly focuses on software implementations for hybrid CPUs. It provides various optimization strategies for Alder Lake, including lack of optimization, a "Good Scenario", and the "Best Scenario". According to the document, lack of optimization will not mean that the CPU will be unable to distribute workloads for hybrid CPUs, which should be handled by ThreadDirector anyway, but some may be distributed to the wrong types of cores, should the scheduling algorithm not recognize the task.

In the "Good Scenario," Intel assumes that the application will be aware of the hybrid architecture. The primary tasks should target Performance cores, whereas non-essential and background threads with lower priority should target Effcieent cores.

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