An Intel Alder Lake-S 12th generation CPU has been spotted in the SiSoftware Sandra database. The processor looks to be an early engineering sample that comes with some nice specifications on the table. The CPU spotted has 16 cores and 32 threads and should be a major upgrade over anything that Intel has to offer.
The 12th generation CPU currently known as Intel Alder Lake-S Desktops has no official name currently but it will be part of the 12th Gen Desktop family which is scheduled for launch in the second half of 2021. It will be the successor to the 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S CPUs which are going to be released in first quarter of 2021.
The Alder Lake chip is configured with 16 cores and interestingly, SiSoftware lists down the thread count at 32 which may not entirely be accurate. The Alder Lake platform will have a hybrid design featuring both Big x86 and smaller Atom cores.
The bigger cores will feature multi-threading, equivalent to 8 cores and 16 threads. The smaller cores however will not have multithreading and will be configured at 8 cores and 8 threads. This would be a total of 16 cores and 24 threads for the Alder Lake CPU but we do not know that for sure.
In the benchmark, the Alder Lake CPU was seen with a base clock of 1.80 GHz and a boost clock of 4.00 GHz. These are in no way the final clock speeds for the chip and we can expect them in the mid 3 GHz range for the base clock and 5 GHz range for the boost clock.
The chip was tested on an internal Alder Lake test platform with support for DDR5-4800 memory. This confirms that Alder Lake will be the first Intel desktop platform to feature the support for DDR5 memory. The Alder Lake CPUs will feature cores from two new architectures, Golden Cove for x86 cores and Gracemont for the Atom cores.
