Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake-S processors are finally out. Featuring a total of sixteen cores, eight Golden Cove, and eight Gracemont, these chips mark a major shift in the chipmaker’s design strategy. Alder Lake offers potent single-threaded performance courtesy of the performance cores, while also keeping up with the competition, thanks to the efficiency cores. Alder Lake will be succeeded by Raptor Lake which will, in turn, be succeeded by Meteor Lake, the company’s first chiplet-based client platform.
Raptor Lake-S is expected to land in the second half of 2022. It’ll leverage the same node as Alder Lake (Intel 7), and likely retain much of the core architecture. We might get something like Willow Cove which was essentially the same as Sunny Cove with a few changes to the cache hierarchy.
According to MLID, Raptor Lake-S will retain support for DDR4 memory in addition to the LGA1700 socket, and the 600-series chipsets. A slide shared by AdoredTV a while back indicates that the 13th Gen lineup will double down on multi-threaded performance. While the performance cores will continue to top out at 8, the efficiency cores will be doubled to 16, resulting in an overall core count of 24 for the Core i9-13900K. The L3 cache will be increased to 36MB. The Core i7-13700K will reportedly still offer 16 cores (8 performance + 8 efficiency) with an L3 cache size of 30MB, while the 13600K will be limited to 14 cores with 24MB of L3 cache.
Interestingly, the slide suggests that the Raptor Lake mobile platform will also feature up to 24 cores (8 performance + 16 efficiency) plus 36MB of L3 cache. Likewise, the Core i7-13700H and the Core i5-13600H will feature 16 and 14 cores, respectively.
Considering that Raptor Lake will go up against AMD’s Zen 4-based Ryzen 6000 processors, it might fall short on the single-threaded and gaming front, but will certainly keep up in multi-threaded workloads.
