Greg Bryant, Intel’s PC chip business leader, shows a computer running Windows on the next-generation Alder Lake processor at CES 2021.
Screenshot of Stephen Shankland / CNET
Intel demonstrated its flagship next-generation laptop chip at CES 2021, a chip code-named Alder Lake that should be faster when you need performance and more energy efficient when you need better battery life. The processor will arrive in the second half of 2021.
The brief demonstration, at an online press conference organized by Intel consumer chip leader Greg Bryant, showed Windows running on the new processor. Intel barely shared details about the chip, but having it up and running is an important step in demonstrating that the chip – and the manufacturing process used to produce it – is maturing. With Intel suffering years of manufacturing problems, this screen is more important than usual to convey confidence in the chip.
Lake Alder will arrive in an environment dramatically different from its predecessors, the 2019 Ice Lake and the 2020 Tiger Lake. Apple is now changing its Mac family from Intel chips in favor of its own M series processors, starting with the M1 on the new MacBook Air and smaller MacBook Pro laptops. These machines are setting new expectations for laptop performance and power. They don’t run Windows, but they will attract Apple’s faithful and may attract owners of Windows PCs.
To improve Alder Lake’s prospects, Intel resorted to a trick used on smartphones and Apple’s M1. It employs power consumption processing cores for times when the laptop is not busy or needs to perform low priority background tasks and faster cores, but with higher power consumption, for times when performance is important, such as games or launching a new application.
“It combines high-performance, high-efficiency cores in a single product,” said Bryant. “It will be the foundation for leading desktop and mobile processors that offer smarter, faster and more efficient computing uses in the real world.”
A chip that powers laptops and desktops is important. Intel’s most advanced 10 and 11 generation Core processors only worked on mobile processors. Intel used earlier designs that could increase the clock speed for machines that are always plugged into a wall outlet.
Intel has announced that some processors will arrive earlier as well. Intel’s new 11th-generation H-series processors for superfine gaming laptops are expected to arrive in the first half of the year. Also new are the Pentium Silver and Celeron N series processors for the cost-sensitive student laptop market. Notably, these chips are now built using Intel’s newest manufacturing process, which can create electronic elements with a width of just 10 billionths of a meter – 10 nm.
Intel’s move from the older 14 nm process to the 10 nm process occurred years later and is still happening slowly. Alder Lake will use an updated version of the process that offers faster transistors, an important step in matching the maximum process speeds of 14 nm.
Apple does not manufacture its own chips, but it does benefit from the skills of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., which has advanced ahead of Intel with 7 nm and now 5 nm manufacturing processes. Intel’s 10nm is comparable to TSMC’s 7nm process, chip analysts say. With the advantages of miniaturizing the new process, Apple was able to place more and more processing circuits, while Intel had to reuse existing designs.
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