Monday, February 14th 2022
Intel Alder Lake-N Makes an Appearance, Features Only Gracemont Cores
Intel's Alder Lake family is apparently still growing and the latest leaks suggest that a new addition is on its way in the shape of the Alder Lake-N. This should be the most basic SKU of Alder Lake CPUs, as it'll only have "small" Gracemont cores and no Golden Cove cores at all, unlike all of its other siblings. The oddities don't stop here though, as these new CPUs won't even have any PCIe lanes from the CPU itself, beyond the chipset interconnect.
It's possible that these will be some kind of embedded parts, as Alder Lake-N is said to come with up to eight cores. The limitation of PCIe lines, of which apparently only a total of nine will be offered, is something that might make it less appealing for embedded systems, especially if it requires a separate chipset. It's possible that Intel has designed these new SKUs for Chromebooks or other budget notebooks, but they'd have to be priced extremely affordably to be appealing, considering how cheap Chromebooks already are. The chips are also said to feature a full GT1 Gen 12.2 GPU with up to 32 EUs, so graphics performance should at least be comparable to Alder Lake-S desktop parts. We'd hazard a guess that the GPU clocks will be a lot lower though.
Sources:
Coelacanth Dream (in Japanese), via @aschilling
It's possible that these will be some kind of embedded parts, as Alder Lake-N is said to come with up to eight cores. The limitation of PCIe lines, of which apparently only a total of nine will be offered, is something that might make it less appealing for embedded systems, especially if it requires a separate chipset. It's possible that Intel has designed these new SKUs for Chromebooks or other budget notebooks, but they'd have to be priced extremely affordably to be appealing, considering how cheap Chromebooks already are. The chips are also said to feature a full GT1 Gen 12.2 GPU with up to 32 EUs, so graphics performance should at least be comparable to Alder Lake-S desktop parts. We'd hazard a guess that the GPU clocks will be a lot lower though.
22 Comments on Intel Alder Lake-N Makes an Appearance, Features Only Gracemont Cores
C0 is 8P+8E+32EU
H0 is 6P+0E+32EU
M0 was rumoured to be the Alder Lake U-series that have 2P+8E+96EU
I'm wondering if these are super-cheap things intended only for embedded devices or whether we're seeing the M0 dies in their first incarnation.
I'm only I'm interested because I really like the idea of an M0 die (fewer P-cores, loads of E-cores, beefy graphics). For most casual users that's by far the most relevant blend of resources and would be a killer deal if it could enable competent $499 laptops with 96EU graphics. Most budget IGP laptops from Intel have been underwhelming because if the CPU was cheap enough the IGP was woeful, and if the IGP was passable it was married to a flagship mobile CPU.
It's a small die so it should be cheap, power-efficient, and competent for everyday tasks and casual gaming. Given how much stuff your average user runs that is single-threaded, the fact it only has two P-cores isn't really a deal-breaker and with 12 threads in total it's going to be fine for heavy workloads where more P-cores get throttled by restrictive laptop TDPs anyway.
Given the total lack of on-chip PCIe lanes, it could well be something that exists only as an embedded solution for thin clients, POS kiosks etc.
Intel Core i9-12900K E-Cores Only Performance Review - Power Consumption & Efficiency | TechPowerUp
The things will likely top-out at 3.3 ghz turbo
Lakefield had 1 P core and 4 E cores with no thread director or hyper threading (SMT), and with DRAM on top stacked with Intel Foveros special sauce. It was pretty much a beta test in most senses for both Foveros and bigLittle.
This is not that, or at least doesn't appear to be.
Intel can pick an M0 die whose E-core is intact and severely damaged to the P-core or iGPU, and ship it as Alder lake-N. However, Gracemont will be unchanged in the Raptor lake generation, so it is also possible to make a new mask with the P core removed from the C0 (Such mask can be used for two years).
In the past Atom CPUs, they are often designed to consume about 10 W when all four cores operate at clocks around 2.5 GHz, and about 6 W around 2.0 GHz. Usecase of P-cores integrated in the desktop CPUs is far different from such case. Each P-core consume 7.5 W per core at 3.6 GHz.
When more performance reviews for Alder lake mobile come out we'll be able to see how the strategy pans out but from the early reports it's looking pretty good.