Intel's First 10nm Desktop CPUs, Alder Lake, Will Use Hybrid Architecture

Intel‘s long-waited 10-nanometer processors for desktops, code-named Alder Lake, won’t arrive until the second half of 2021, but the company revealed one major detail a year ahead of launch: They will use Intel’s hybrid architecture approach that was first seen in this year’s Lakefield mobile chips.

Whereas Lakefield processors consisted of one high-performance Sunny Cove core and four low-power Tremont Cores, Alder Lake will use the successors for the respective core types—Golden Cove for high performance and Gracemont for low power—to optimize performance-per-watt.

Koduri said the company is working on a next-generation hardware-guided scheduler that will optimize Alder Lake processors to squeeze every ounce of performance out of each core. Beyond delivering great performance, Alder Lake will also be Intel‘s “best performance-per-watt architecture,” he added.

“While Lakefield was tuned for battery life, in Alder Lake, we have advanced the hybrid architectures significantly with a focus on performance,” he said.