Tuesday, October 6th 2020
Intel Alder Lake-S Processor with 16c/32t (Hybrid) Spotted on SANDRA Database
Intel's upcoming Core "Alder Lake-S" desktop processor, which is shaping up to be the first Hybrid desktop processor, surfaced on the SiSoft SANDRA benchmark database, as dug up by TUM_APISAK. The chip is reported by SANDRA to be 16-core/32-thread, although this is expected to be a combination of eight "big" high-performance cores, and eight "small" high-efficiency cores, in a multi-core topology similar to Arm big.LITTLE. Other specs read by SANDRA include clock speeds around "1.40 GHz," ten 1.25 MB L2 caches (possibly 8x 1.25 MB for the big "Golden Cove" cores, 2x 1.25 MB for the two groups of small "Gracemont" cores), and 30 MB of L3 cache. The Hybrid processor architecture is expected to introduce several platform-level innovations to the modern desktop, taking advantage of the extremely low power draw of the "Gracemont" cores when the machine isn't grinding serious workloads.
Sources:
TUM_APISAK (Twitter), via VideoCardz
34 Comments on Intel Alder Lake-S Processor with 16c/32t (Hybrid) Spotted on SANDRA Database
24T should be the real number, the odd core configuration must've messed up SANDRA readings.
Could work
As far as customers go, power users like yourself are a small drip in a large pond. The world is ending! Everyone grab your tin foil hats!
You got this 100% backwards, only someone really knowledgeable like a power user would even think of or measure these things. Data centers run at full blast most of the time, in fact their goal is to maximize usage as much as possible. If your CPU nodes are idling, you're losing money. Again, this is a product for consumers, not for companies.
8x BIG cores
8x HT
8x little cores
This has 16 cores of which 8 are smaller and don't have HT. So 16 cores in total with 24 threads in total.
Lets not forget about the Core 2 Duo, either. One of the most successful processor lineups and it was based on the Pentium M architecture, which was....wait for it.....designed for efficiency rather than outright power. Power efficiency is what drives the whole computing industry. So yes, we should care about it rather than considering efficiency to be an "abomination". That's just straight up ignorance.
CPU core power while idling : about 4 W in total, most cores consume well, well under a single watt. "SoC power" means the whole chip with memory controllers and all that, a big.LITTLE architecture wouldn't change that figure.
So, for instance, in an 8 core with 4 big and 4 small cores where let's say the small cores consume half as much power. That would mean 3W for the cores in total but the SoC figure which you can see eats most of the power would remain unchanged. The total SoC+Core figure would go down by what, less than 10%. That's nothing, literally no more than a watt. In a phone that matters a lot, in a desktop PC it's nothing. You could leave the PC on 24/7 and the difference in electricity cost would be indiscernible, within margin of error.
Also, a 16 core chip with 8 small cores would consume more power than an 8 core using just big cores by the way.
You clearly do not understand that you can either increase efficiency with the purpose of increasing performance or with the purpose of lowering power. Small cores on the same chip drive power down not performance up.
Before you call me ignorant, learn more in depth information about these things. big.LITTLE has no place in desktops, it provides nothing.
Fine dude, whatever, you just keep believing I'm the ignorant one here. I do wonder, if Intel came out and told you that you should hit yourself with a frying pan over your head would you do it ? After all, they're the ones with the billions of dollars and thousands of engineers, they must be onto something right ?
They are totally not just trying to sell sub-par products for more money. No way.
The only way this would be useful is if the little cores could be used at the same time with the big ones. But I don't think that will be the case.
Not every Intel product made (logical) sense, this one doesn't have to either.