Rocket Lake desktop CPUs will arrive first, but Intel had already announced in the summer that the next generation “Alder Lake” will follow in autumn 2021. This desktop CPU is based on a hybrid architecture with 8 high-end and 8 energy-efficient cores.

The low-power cores do not support Hyper-Threading as two logical cores per physical core, thus this 16-core processor can process a maximum of 24 threads in parallel.

This architecture of so-called large and small cores ("big.LITTLE") is known from smartphone chips such as Qualcomm or Samsung and Intel introduced this technology for the first time last June with its 'Lakefield' ultra-mobile processors . These Core i5-L16G7 and Core i3-L13G4 have a total of five cores, with Intel combining four energy-efficient 'Tremont' CPU cores from the Atom series with a "Sunny Cove" high-end core from the "Ice Lake" generation.

Geekbench does not yet recognize the Intel "Alder Lake" CPU correctly, however, because the maximum clock frequency specified is an unrealistic 17.6 GHz, so that one should also be careful when interpreting the other information. The base clock of 1.38 GHz could apply to the energy-efficient cores or it could be due to the early status of this CPU, which is still in one of the first test phases. The performance determined by Geekbench is also irrelevant here, because an 8-core CPU of the "Rocket Lake" generation achieves 40 to 65 percent higher results, although it can only process 16 threads at the same time, but has significantly higher frequencies.

The “Alder Lake” generation, likely is announced next fall, and will be 10-nanometer desktop CPUs from Intel and could even support PCI Express 5.0 , but the latter is still unconfirmed.

Intel Alder Lake desktop CPU spotted in Geekbench