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Intel Alder Lake-S Core i7/i9 (ES2) w/ Boost Clock of 4.6GHz Has a PL2 Power Consumption of 225W

Thanks to some more info from Igor’s Lab, we now know a bit about the power consumption and boost clocks of Intel’s upcoming 12th Gen Alder Lake-S CPUs. Igor has shared the specs of a 16 core/24 thread processor, internally known as the Core-1800 (likely the Core i7 or i9). The SKU is based on the B0 stepping and is an Engineering Sample 2 with a base clock of just 1.8GHz, indicating that it’s still far from its finalized retail state.

The Core-1800 features eight high-performance Golden Cove cores and eight low-power Grace Mont cores, with only the former featuring hyperthreading, resulting in a total thread count of 24 rather than 32. The SKU has a maximum boost clock of 4.6GHz (for the two fastest cores), dropping to 4.4GHz with four cores loaded and just 4GHz with all eight hi-performance cores under load. The low-power Grace Mont cores have a boost clock of 3.4GHz with four cores and 3GHz with all eight cores under load.

The CPU has a PL1 (stock) power draw of 125W while the PL2 (load) power is pegged at 225W, likely to hit the 250W mark in some scenarios. The fact that the engineering sample is able to reach 4.6GHz on the fastest cores indicates that Intel’s 10nm process has come a long way, but the PL2 value of 224W still shows it’s nowhere as mature as the preceding 14nm node.

It’ll be interesting to how what kind of clocks the final retail chip will be capable of, and whether it manages to cross the 5GHz mark or not. With 10nm, Intel is basically on the same level as AMD in terms of CPU boost clocks, and this time around it’ll primarily be the IPC and inter-core/memory/cache latency that will decide the winner.

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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