Intel at CES: Alder Lake looks a lot like M1, plus new chips for gaming laptops

This week’s Consumer Electronics Show was never going to be where Intel would go into extreme detail about the new 12th generation processors, but nonetheless, the company hosted a press conference this morning that featured some news. developments in 11th generation processors. it’s already shipped, along with a first look at what to expect from the 12th generation Lake Alder.

Using an enhanced version of the 10nm SuperFin process, Alder Lake will take the M1 chip based on Apple’s ARM instruction set and its ilk with a somewhat similar architecture. Namely, this means a hybrid architecture of high performance (Golden Lake) and high efficiency (Gracemont) cores similar in spirit to the BIG.little design of ARM and Lakefield. Intel says these are desktop and laptop processors and will reach consumers in the second half of 2021, but details are otherwise quite scarce.

More than anything, it looks like Intel is trying to get ahead of the narrative that the company faces serious challenges as Macs with M1 processors offered much better price / performance ratios than what Intel is currently putting into devices. competitors, especially in the face of Intel’s delays.

Sadly, that’s all we’ve learned about the 12th generation today. But as noted above, there have been a few evolutionary steps for 11th gen processors. Towards the end of Q1 2020, the 14nm Rocket Lake-S with Cypress Cove cores promises performance improvements such as a 50% improvement in onboard graphics performance and 19% faster instructions per cycle.

The full lineup has yet to be announced, but Intel has presented some specs for the upcoming Core i9-11900K: eight cores up to 5.3 / 4.8 GHz, 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and RAM support. DDR4 at 3200 MHz. No pricing information has been revealed yet, so expect more in the coming months.

Additionally, we learned that production has started on Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake server processors, which feature increased core count and improved performance, Intel says. The company also announced new processors for business (11th generation Intel Core vPro), Intel Pentium Silver and Celeron N-series processors for the education market, and 11th generation Intel Core H-series mobile processors that will work. in tandem with today’s mobile processors. – Announced the Nvidia RTX 30 series mobile GPUs in high-end ultra-portable gaming laptops this year.

All in all, today’s event was more of a teaser than a full reveal on every level. But we at least have a general idea of ​​where Intel is going in what is sure to be a somewhat pivotal year for the company and its competitors.

List image by Intel