Leaked Intel slides evidence of Alder Lake-S hybrid CPUs

[kalniel]

But why not have 8, 12 or more full fat cores that can downclock when required? This just doesn't make sense for the desktop. I'm not sure it even makes sense for laptops when you can downclock so well now.

Downclocking is fine, but you should be able to get even more power saving with an appropriate sized core in the first place.

The above point about uncore overhead is a valid one - you'd hope that in the future that would be addressed too with a less-monolithic design.

[DavidC1]

To be fair to Intel, hybrid makes sense for laptops. Modern Atom has more than enough grunt for ~ 90% of the stuff most people do, but it's atrocious for the other 10%. If they can stick some fast big cores on an Atom processor that are power-gated for 90% of the time, they can use the lower power draw of the atom cores to either extend battery life or enable EVEN THINNER designs.

The "Atom" portion is not low performance in any sense of the word. The Gracemont cores in Alderlake are supposed to be slightly faster than Skylake per core.

Remember Skylake? No? Maybe you remember Cometlake, which still uses Skylake cores. It's eight of that. Sure it should be lower clocked, but still.

[edmundhonda]

The Gracemont cores in Alderlake are supposed to be slightly faster than Skylake per core.

Lol. In perf/watt, maybe?

[DavidC1]

Lol. In perf/watt, maybe?

No, in absolute performance.

The Goldmont Plus cores in current Atom-based chips are Core 2 levels. Tremont that's in Lakefield(and soon to be in Atoms and Pentiums) is 30% faster than that, making it Ivy Bridge level. Gracemont is yet another big step. It should end up being faster than Skylake. Of course Skylake clocks higher, but that's a separate thing. I'm talking about uarch.