A new leak from YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead lays out Intel’s plans throughout 2022. According to the rumor, Intel plans on releasing Alder Lake HX mobile processors in early 2022, bringing desktop-class performance to laptops. The company is also gearing up for the next-gen Raptor Lake launch in late 2022, and the flagship chip from the range is said to feature a total of 24 cores.
We’ve known for a while that Intel plans on using a big/little core design for Alder Lake processors. Similar to Apple’s M1 chip and most mobile processors, Intel plans on using big, powerful cores to handle demanding workloads that only require a few threads. For multithreaded workloads, the processor can use little, high-efficiency cores to split the workload.
Alder Lake desktop chips will be based on two designs. The S1 design comes with eight big cores, known as Golden Cove, and eight little cores, known as Gracemont. The S2 design features six Golden Cove cores and no Gracemont cores.
The leak says Intel plans on lifting the review embargo for its first Alder Lake processors on October 25. Intel plans on launching an i9, i7, and i5 processor around that time. The i9 will feature eight Golden Cove and eight Gracemont cores, the i7 will come with eight Golden Cove and four Gracemont cores, and the i5 will come with six Golden Cove and four Gracemont cores. All three processors will come with 32 execution units (EUs) based on Intel’s Xe graphics.
Following the desktop launch, the leaker says that Intel will announce Alder Lake mobile processors after CES 2022. These processors will support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 on mobile and come with 96 EUs for Xe graphics. The H-series chips will feature six Golden Cove and eight Gracemont cores. U-series chips for low-power laptops will come with two Golden Cove and eight Gracemont cores.
The most exciting news comes in the high-performance realm. The leak claims that Intel plans on launching Alder Lake HX processors at the same time, which are said to deliver desktop-class performance to laptops. This chip is based on the desktop design, with eight Golden Cove and eight Gracemont cores.
Later in 2022, Intel will launch Raptor Lake processors. These chips also use the big/little core design, and they’re based on the same underlying architecture as Alder Lake. They’ll feature enhanced Golden Cove cores — called Raptor Cove — while using the same Gracemont cores from Alder Lake. They’re set to launch in time for the 2022 holiday season.
The flagship chip is said to feature eight Raptor Cove cores and 16 Gracemont cores, showing Intel’s dedication to this design. Raptor Lake processors will compete with AMD’s upcoming Zen 4 processors, but Intel’s fiercest competition may come from Apple.
“Honestly, Apple scares us much more than AMD at the moment. They aren’t sitting still, and we are worried they have far greater ambitions then most people are currently assuming,” an anonymous source told Moore’s Law is Dead.
