Intel at CES: Alder Lake looks a lot like M1, plus new chips for gaming laptops

The Client Electronics Present this week was by no means going to be the place Intel would enterprise into excessive element on main new Twelfth-generation CPUs, however nonetheless, the corporate hosted a press convention this morning that laid out a couple of new evolutions of the Eleventh-gen CPUs it has already been transport, plus an early take a look at what to anticipate from the Twelfth-generation Alder Lake.

Utilizing an improved model of the 10nm SuperFin course of, Alder Lake will tackle Apple’s ARM instruction set-based M1 chip and its ilk with a considerably comparable structure. Specifically, meaning a hybrid structure of high-performance (Golden Lake) and high-efficiency (Gracemont) cores comparable in spirit to ARM’s BIG.little design and to Lakefield. Intel says these are desktop and laptop computer CPUs and that they’re going to attain customers within the second half of 2021, however particulars are in any other case fairly sparse.

Greater than something, it seems to be like Intel is making an attempt to get forward of the narrative that the corporate is dealing with some severe challenges forward as Macs with M1 CPUs delivered a lot better price-to-performance ratios than what Intel is presently placing in competing gadgets—particularly within the face of Intel’s delays.

Sadly, that was all we realized about Twelfth-gen at present. However as famous above, there have been a couple of evolutionary steps for Eleventh-gen CPUs. Coming towards the top of Q1 2020, the 14nm Rocket Lake-S with Cypress Cove cores guarantees some efficiency boosts like a 50 % enchancment in built-in graphics efficiency and 19 % sooner directions per cycle.

The complete lineup hasn’t been introduced but, however Intel did preview some specs for the upcoming Core i9-11900K: eight cores at as much as 5.3/4.8 GHz, 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and help for 3200MHz DDR4 RAM. No pricing info has been revealed but, so count on to be taught extra within the subsequent couple of months.

Additionally, we realized that manufacturing has begun on Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake server processors, which supply elevated core counts and improved efficiency, Intel says. The corporate additionally introduced new CPUs for enterprise (Eleventh-gen Intel Core vPro), N-series Intel Pentium Silver and Celeron CPUs for the schooling market, and Eleventh-gen Intel Core H-series cell CPUs that may work in tandem with at present’s just-announced Nvidia RTX 30-series cell GPUs in ultra-portable high-end gaming laptops this 12 months.

All instructed, the occasion at present was extra of a teaser than a full reveal throughout the board. However we do a minimum of have a common sense of what Intel’s focus can be in what’s certain to be a considerably pivotal 12 months for the corporate and its competitors.

Itemizing picture by Intel