Here's how Intel is coming to the forefront of technology innovation.
Intel has just announced its architectural innovations at the company’s Architecture Day 2021 event. With this, the company has given us a sneak peek at what we can expect from the 12th Generation Alder Lake processors. While these changes are all going to be under the hood, here’s how this will affect your workflow.
Performance Hybrid
One of the key highlights of Architecture Day 2021 was the reveal of Performance Hybrid approach that will be implemented on the upcoming Alder Lake CPUs. With this, Intel is redefining the x86 architecture, bringing CPUs to the market that combine Cores of two different designs. On Alder Lake, Intel says there will be Performance Cores and Efficiency Cores. Performance cores will be taking on the heavy lifting of tasks like gaming, content creation etc, while the efficiency cores will handle background tasks. What this could possibly mean is that if you use your PC for light tasks, they will run on the efficiency cores, effectively reducing power consumption
Intel Thread Director
Intel has also developed Intel Thread Director technology that will allow all the cores to work seamlessly with the operating system. The technology allows the processor to monitor the runtime instruction mix as well as provide runtime feedback to the OS. It also manages to dynamically adapt guidance based on the thermal design point (TDP), operating conditions and power settings.
Deep integration with Windows 11
Intel has jointly worked with Microsoft to offer a much more efficient OS thread scheduler within Windows 11. The OS thread scheduler is a kernel component used in Windows that decides, which threads to run and where to run them. While these decisions happen in the background, they have a huge impact on power consumption.
Windows 11 will also use Thread Director hints to decide which cores to park and which to unpark for power savings.
Huge Design Range
The upcoming Alder Lake CPUs will be available across various scalable client architectures. The desktop CPUs will use the new LGA 1700 socket. Apart from that, there will also be a BGA Type3 Mobile CPU architecture for laptops. Lastly, there is a low power ultra-mobile BGA Type4 HDI architecture.
PCIe Gen 5 support
SSDs and other accessories are currently based on PCIe Gen 4. However, going forward we will be getting a lot of PCIe Gen 5 cards and accessories. As Intel has already added support for PCIe Gen 5 in the Alder Lake CPUs, it clearly shows that the company is making its upcoming processors future proof.
