Intel has already spilled the beans on the its Alder Lake-S processors, which will be the first desktop CPUs to use an x86 hybrid design. New SiSoftware submissions (spotted via @_rogame ) give us a teaser of what's to expect inside the upcoming hybrid chips' iGPU.
On the computing side, Alder Lake-S serves up a fascinating combination of Golden Cove CPU cores and Atom Gracemont cores. Despite giving us a breakdown of Alder Lake-S at Architecture Day 2020, Intel never did confirm which generation iGPU the processors will use. Considering Alder Lake-S launches next year, we think they'll likely tap Intel's Gen12 Xe graphics.
A couple of Intel documents brings a lot of credence to the rumor that Alder Lake-S will require the new LGA1700 CPU socket to take advantage of Intel's Big-Bigger design. The LGA1700 socket has up to 41.7% more pins than the existing LGA1200 socket and is one the more substantial transitions on a mainstream Intel platform in the last couple of years.
Although not confirmed by Intel, the recently discovered SiSoftware entries paint the Alder Lake-S iGPU with 32 Execution Units (EUs), which amounts to a total of 256 shader cores. The clock speed of these shader cores reportedly maxes out at 1.15 GHz. We suspect that this setup is only one of many that Intel is cooking up, considering that we've already seen up to 12 potential Alder Lake-S configurations. Moreover, the entry-level chips are typically the ones that come with 32 EUs.
Existing Ice Lake processors employ the Gen11 solution. For comparison, the Core i3-1000G1 and Core i5-1035G1 both come with 32 EUs. The iGPU for the first is clocked at 900 MHz, while the latter peaks at 1.05 GHz. The Alder Lake-S sample seemingly comes with a slight performance uplift of 100 MHz.
Intel hasn't slapped a precise launch date on its Alder Lake-S processors yet. Alder Lake-S is the successor to Tiger Lake, so the processors will probably debut as the 12th Generation Core lineup.
