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

The consumer electronics show this week would never be where Intel would venture in detail on the big new 12th generation CPUs, but nonetheless, the company hosted a press conference this morning outlining some new evolutions of the 11th generation CPUs. it has already shipped, plus an early look at what to expect from the 12th generation Alder Lake.

Using an improved version of the 10nm SuperFin process, Alder Lake will use Apple’s AR1 instructional system-based M1 chip and a similar architecture. Namely, it means a hybrid architecture of high-performance (Golden Lake) and high-efficiency (Gracemont) cores similar to ARM’s BIG.little design and Lakefield. Intel says these are computers and computers for computers and that they will reach consumers in the second half of 2021, but the details are otherwise scarce.

More than anything, it looks like Intel is trying to advance the story that the company faces serious challenges, as Macs with M1 CPUs deliver much better price-to-performance ratios than Intel currently puts in competing devices – especially in light of Intel’s delays.

Unfortunately, that was all we learned today about the 12th generation. But as noted above, there have been some evolutionary steps for 11th-generation CPUs. By the end of the first quarter of 2020, the 14nm Rocket Lake-S with Cypress Cove cores promises some performance improvements such as a 50 percent improvement in integrated graphics performance and 19 percent faster instructions per cycle.

The full range has not been announced yet, but Intel has previewed some specs ahead of the upcoming Core i9-11900K: eight core points up to 5.3 / 4.8 GHz, 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes and support for 3200MHz DDR4 RAM. No price information has been released yet, so expect to know more in the next few months.

In addition, we hear that production of Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake server processors has begun, offering increased core counts and improved performance, says Intel. The company also announced new business CPUs (11th-generation Intel Core vPro), N-Series Intel Pentium Silver and Celeron CPUs for the education market, and 11th-generation Intel Core H-series mobile CPUs that will work with today’s just-announced Nvidia RTX 30-series mobile GPUs in ultra-portable high-end gaming laptops.

All in all, the event today is more of a mockery than a full revelation across the board. But we have at least a general understanding of what Intel’s focus will be in an important year for the company and its competition.

List by Intel