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Intel Alder Lake CPUs Likely to Beat Ryzen 5000 in Gaming and More: Up to 20% IPC Increase and 5GHz Boost

According to sources close to Moore’s Law is Dead, Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs should be quite a bit faster than AMD’s Zen 3 based processors, including the higher-end Ryzen 9 5900X. As already reported multiple times, Alder Lake is set to be Intel’s first mainstream processor family based on a hybrid core (big.LITTLE) architecture.

According to the YouTuber, the high-performance “Big Cores” in Alder Lake, known as Golden Cove are going to come with an IPC boost of as much as 20%. The average IPC uplift is expected to be somewhere in the 16-18% range, and boost clocks of up to 5GHz will ensure an overall single-threaded performance increase of close to 30%. Thanks to the use of the “newer” 10nm node, the hybrid processors are also expected to come with a 15% lower power draw than existing Comet Lake-S and other Skylake derivatives.

In case you’re wondering about the low-power cores, codenamed Grace Mont, these aren’t really “little”. In fact, they are supposed to be on par with Skylake core which powers most of Intel’s CPU lineups. Skylake hasn’t really seen an update on the desktop platform for over five years now, and if Golden Cove really offers a 20% increase over Willow Cove, you can very well expect a single-threaded performance boost close of an insane 35-40% (15% from Sunny/Willow Cove and 20% from Golden Cove).

The mobile-grade Alder Lake-P chips are also getting beefed up with more than twice as many cores as Tiger Lake-U while the desktop lineup is expected to top out at 16 cores. For the Alder Lake-S (LGA1700) desktop family:

  • Core i9: 8 GC + 8GM cores
  • Core i7/Core i5: 6-8 GC + 0-8GM
  • Core i3: 4-6GC + 0GM (no low-power cores)

The specs of the mobile-grade Alder Lake-P lineup are a little less certain. While engineering samples with up to 6 Golden Cove (Big) cores and 8 Grace Mont (little) cores have been spotted, it’s unclear whether the final retail versions will include the 14-core variant or top out at 10 (8+2) or 12 (8+4) cores.

In case you had forgotten, Alder Lake is slated to launch by the end of 2021, or early 2022, with PCIe 5.0 support, DDR5 memory, and a brand new chipset and socket family. High-speed DDR4 RAM should also be supported on certain boards, similar to how Skylake supported both DDR3 and DDR4 memory.

Areej Syed

Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Divinity, Torment, Baldur's Gate and so much more... Contact: areejs12@hardwaretimes.com.
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