Intel at CES: Alder Lake looks a lot like M1, plus new gaming laptop chips

This week’s Consumer Electronics Show would never be where Intel would venture into extreme detail on the main 12th generation CPUs, but the company nevertheless gave a press conference this morning that presented some new developments in the 11th generation CPUs it is already being commercialized, in addition to a first analysis of what to expect from the 12th generation Lago Alder.

Using an improved version of the 10 nm SuperFin process, Alder Lake will use the M1 chip based on Apple’s ARM instruction set and its ilk with somewhat similar architecture. In other words, this means a hybrid architecture of high performance (Golden Lake) and high efficiency (Gracemont) cores similar in spirit to ARM’s BIG.little design and Lakefield. Intel says that these are CPUs for desktops and laptops and that they will reach consumers in the second half of 2021, but the details are very scarce.

More than anything, it appears that Intel is trying to advance the narrative that the company faces some serious challenges as Macs with M1 CPUs deliver much better price / performance ratios than what Intel is currently putting on competing devices – especially in the face of Intel’s delays.

Unfortunately, that was all we learned about the 12th generation today. But, as noted above, there were some evolutionary steps for 11th generation CPUs. Towards the end of the first quarter of 2020, the 14 nm Rocket Lake-S with Cypress Cove cores promises some performance increases such as a 50 percent improvement in integrated graphics performance and 19 percent faster instructions per cycle.

The full line has not yet been announced, but Intel has predicted some specifications for the next Core i9-11900K: eight cores up to 5.3 / 4.8 GHz, 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes and support for 3200 MHz DDR4 RAM. No information pricing has been revealed yet, so expect to learn more in the coming months.

In addition, we learned that production started on Intel’s 10 nm Ice Lake server processors, which offer increased core counts and improved performance, says Intel. The company also announced new business CPUs (11th generation Intel Core vPro), Intel Pentium Silver and Celeron N series CPUs for the education market and 11th generation Intel Core H series mobile CPUs that will work in conjunction with today’s – announced GPUs Nvidia RTX 30 series mobile phones in ultra-portable, next-generation gaming laptops this year.

In all, today’s event was more of a provocation than a full reveal across the board. But at least we have a general sense of what Intel’s focus will be on what will certainly be a crucial year for the company and its competitors.

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