New rumours suggest that Intel will develop a version of its hybrid Lakefield architecture for future multi-core desktop CPUs in order to deliver high core counts and maintain power efficiency as it continues to ramp up its commercial-scale 10nm manufacturing efforts. The CPU design, codenamed Alder Lake-S, has been likened to ARM's big.Little strategy which is quite common in the smartphone ecosystem today, where two or more heterogenous classes of cores are combined on a single processor. The purported Intel desktop CPUs based on Alder Lake-S would arrive roughly two generations down the line, if the rumours are accurate.
The move would not be unprecedented, considering that Intel[1] announced its hybrid Lakefield[2] effort as far back as 2018[3]. This combines one high-performance Core-series core with four Atom-series cores, and is expected to be used for ultra-slim or even foldable devices as early as the middle of this year. However, the rumoured Alder Lake-S CPU is said to be designed with eight big and eight small cores.
Anandtech has reported[4] on the rumour, which comes from the Chinese Twitter user momomo_us[5], who is a known leaker. Since plans change and multiple efforts never leave the experimentation stage, this should not be considered a definite future product line for Intel until it is announced or appears on an official roadmap.
Alder Lake-S is said to require a new LGA1700 socket and variants could have TDPs ranging from 80W to 150W. Three variants are currently noted with two featuring the 8+8 core arrangement at two different TDP levels, and what looks like a lower-end version with only six big cores and no little ones. All three are also said to feature Intel's GT1 integrated graphics capabilities.
Given the...