Alder Lake-M With LPDDR5 Appears in Benchmark Results

A new SiSoftware benchmark result has given us our first look at one of Intel's Alder Lake M mobile processors. According to the listing, this Alder Lake chip will feature a ten-core configuration with up to a 4.7GHz boost frequency, along with support for LPDDR5 memory. This is the first Alder Lake M chip we've seen in any benchmark, suggesting the CPU is a prototype. That's furthered by the fact that it was tested on an Intel Reference Validation Platform. 

What we know about Alder Lake-M is that it'll be one of Intel's most power-efficient processor lineups for the Alder Lake generation. They will be targeted at low-powered notebooks and ultrabooks, designed to focus on power efficiency rather than performance, like the Alder Lake-P models.

Alder Lake-M's core configuration is the most striking attribute. It'll be based on what Intel calls its UP4 design, which maxes out at two P-cores and eight E-cores. This is a significant change from both the mobile and desktop chips, which use an equal (or almost equal amount) of P-cores and E-cores.

The SiSoftware results do reflect this as well with a 10-core design. But what's strange is the added specification of 20 threads, E-cores don't have more than two threads, so this could be an error on SiSoftware's part.

Other specs include 5MB of L2 cache and 12MB of L3 cache, a base frequency of 806MHz, and a boost clock of 4.7GHz. The chip also runs LPDDR5 memory, according to the LP5 branding in the name. This means Alder Lake M will be one of the first mobile platforms to adopt low-profile DDR5 memory. Memory bandwidth for this type of memory should be similar to regular DDR5.

According to SiSoftware's benchmarks, including its Processor Multi-Media, Cryptography, Financial Analysis, and Scientific Analysis benchmarks, the Alder Lake M chip has similar performance to a Ryzen 3 2200G. However, please take these results with a huge grain of salt, as SiSoftware's benchmarks are highly specific to specific workloads, so real-world performance is still a major unknown. 

We expect performance to be better than Intel's current low-powered units, so we expect better performance than a Ryzen 3 2200G.