Several developer manuals for Intel's future Alder Lake chips have been published. According to it, the chipmaker admits that the core counts for laptop and desktop variants are different. According to expectations, the first Alder Lake CPUs will be available on November 4.
Several desktop and mobile application types will be produced, according to Intel's website. These will be accessible with varying combinations of CPU cores and GPU execution units, as well as varied storage capacities. CPUs for laptops based on Alder Lake-P will include up to six strong P-cores and eight energy-efficient E cores, according to the company's announcement. The same was previously clear from a leaked roadmap, but it has now been confirmed by the official game developer and publisher. Intel also claims that all Alder Lake SKUs for laptops will be equipped with E-core processors. The laptop models additionally include integrated graphics processors (GPUs) with up to 96 execution units.
It is also said by the chipmaker that Alder Lake-S desktop processors can have up to a total of eight P-cores and eight E-cores. Desktop models that do not include E-cores will also be available. In keeping with earlier estimates, an Intel Core i5-12400 with only six P-cores was recently discovered to be on the market. According to Intel, the desktop SKUs with integrated GPUs will also receive an additional 32 execution units.
Core types and instruction sets
The business also offers information on the many cores that are used in the Alder Lake chips. As previously revealed by the business, Alder Lake will get under P-cores, codenamed Golden Cove, as part of the Golden Cove program. Those cores are focused on performance and have the ability to handle hyperthreading. At the same time, E-cores, which the business refers to as Gracemont, will be installed in the chips. They are primarily concerned with efficiency and do not provide hyperthreading.
Both core types have their own pools of L1 and L2 cache, allowing them to operate almost completely independently of one another. The L3 cache is a shared resource. Intel claims that the cores are also capable of supporting the same instruction sets. The manufacturer indicates that only the P-cores support AVX-512, and that the E-cores must be disabled in the BIOS. But according to Anandtech's Ian Cutress on Twitter, this is a glitch andA VX-512 is not supported on Alder Lake. "The guide is currently being revised. AVX-512 is not present in Alder Lake, as confirmed by the game's developers "
Alder Lake software optimizations
The developer guide for this hybrid architecture includes more information on software optimizations for this architecture. The Intel Thread Director is used by the processors. In this case, the operating system should be made aware of the differences in performance and efficiency between the two types of cores. When the Thread Director has this information, it can divide different calculation jobs among the appropriate core types. An operating system would assume that all cores are equally fast if this director were not present, and jobs could be divided to the incorrect cores.
In order to assist developers of applications and games, the company provides numerous "optimization tactics." The aforementioned Intel Thread Director, which attempts to automatically divide workloads between the cores, allows applications that are not built for Alder Lake to nevertheless take advantage of the two processor types. That should result in improved performance 'in the vast majority of cases,' according to Intel, but the company notes that in some cases it may prevent some tasks from running on the incorrect core type.
P-cores would be assigned principal responsibilities in a good scenario when the developer has taken "minimum measures" to achieve hybrid awareness. Background tasks that are not absolutely necessary should be concentrated on the E-cores.
Ideally, engineers would construct a task system with two thread pools, which would be the "best" case situation. Typically, a primary pool would be dedicated to intensive computation jobs meant for P-cores. Secondary thread pools should be used for workloads that are "a good fit for E-cores," according to the specification. Intel cites various instances, including audio mixing, shader compilation, asset streaming, and decompression, to name a few examples. When the performance cores are overcrowded and there is still space on the efficient cores, developers could also offload primary workloads to E-cores to save time and resources.
A second confirmation comes from the company, which says it is working with middleware companies to integrate support for the Alder Lake platform and its "hybrid architecture" into game engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity. That should occur in 'future releases,' as the name suggests. In addition, the company collaborates with companies such as Denuvo to ensure that specific DRM software is compatible with the Alder Lake design.
Intel confirms that the Alder Lake platform will be released globally in the fourth quarter of this year, but gives no other details. According to leaked information from MSI, Intel is anticipated to ship the first Alder Lake models on November 4th. This would entail overclockable K and KF processors for desktop computers, with the latter variants lacking an integrated graphics processor (IGP). A later release date is predicted for the initial laptop processors and lower-ranked desktop variants.
Intel confirms the core specifications of its next Alder Lake processors on its website.
