The first (real-world) benchmark of an Intel Alder Lake-S processor has been spotted in the form of an entry in the Ashes Escalation benchmark database. The CPU in question is a 16 core part, likely the Alder Lake-S flagship with eight Golden Cove (performance) cores and eight Grace Mont (low-power) cores. The reason why the game detects it as a 24-core instead of a 16-core part is that only the eight high-performance Golden Cove cores feature hyperthreading, resulting in a unique heterogeneous configuration not seen in the x86 space up until now.
You’ve got 8 Golden Cove cores and 16 threads and only 8 Grace Mont cores/threads, resulting in an overall core count of 16, but a thread count of 24. The CPU was paired with 32GB memory and run with the integrated UHD graphics. The SKU has a base clock of 2.2GHz which isn’t surprising considering that we’re likely looking at an early engineering sample. Considering that this is Intel’s first mainstream desktop CPU lineup based on its 10nm process node, it’ll be interesting to see far it’ll be able to take the boost clocks. The Golden Cove cores will likely get higher boost clocks compared to the Grace Mont cores. Another interesting bit to keep in mind is that Lakefield which was Intel’s first hybrid CPU has terrible inter-core latencies. Intel will need to significantly improve on that front if it wants to keep up with AMD in the PC gaming space.
