Computer

Intel’s masterstroke to ARM: 8 Core CPU and 8K GPU at 60 FPS

After the non-acquisition of NVIDIA over ARM where the former will have to pay more than 3 billion to the latter for the failure of the purchase, the British company navigates in turbulent waters alone and hand in hand with the UK. But soon it will have to face a blow that could be devastating, since Intel has already prepared the battle and the start of the war with its low-power processors for Ultrabooks. These are the first details of Alder Lake-N.

After the previous presentations of the two families of processors for desktop and gaming laptops, it remains to be discovered what Intel has prepared for Ultrabooks, extremely low-power laptops where the Atom could no longer compete against MRA and their SoCs. Well, the blow that Intel is preparing could be a master and would leave companies like Qualcomm or Samsung out of the game and open a new season that could be extended to other devices.

Intel Alder Lake-N: 8 Core CPU with ARM in the spotlight

Intel-Alder-Lake

There is not much information about it and this has been indirectly seen thanks to the partial boot record of Alder Lake that the company has uploaded in the Linux repository within the project SoundOpen Firmware.

What we see within said project and in perfect Japanese is the preview of what will undoubtedly be the highest-end CPU within the Alder Lake-N architecture. What Coreboot has revealed is quite interesting:

[0.345485] smpboot: CPU0: Genuine Intel(R) 0000 (family: 0x6, model: 0xbe, stepping: 0x0)

There are no details yet about the 0xbe model, although it should be added to the linux kernel shortly knowing that it is detected as Alder Lake variant N, where its specifications are more than surprising:

[ 0.376494] smp: Brought up 1 node, 8 CPUs

[ 0.377487] smpboot: Max logical packages: 2

[ 0.378486] smpboot: Total of 8 processors activated (19009.53 BogoMIPS)

Seen this, what the patch makes clear is that there will be two clusters of 4 Cores each to make a total of 8 Gracemont cores that will share L2 cache and although we do not know their frequency and consumption, it is clear that we are talking about a ultra low power processor which has a slightly higher IPC than a processor sky lake desktopso that’s an incredible jump for Ultrabooks.

iGPU Gen 12 Xe LP with 32 EU

Xe-HPG D2 Sampling

[ 2.276814] i915 device info: pciid=0x46d0 rev=0x00 platform=ALDERLAKE_P (subplatform=0x1) gen=12

  • [2.280151] i915 device info: graphics version: 12
  • [2.281986] i915 device info: media version: 12
  • [2.283719] i915 device info: display version: 13
  • [2.285521] i915 device info:gt:0
  • [2.286870] i915 device info: iommu: disabled
  • [2.288544] i915 device info: memory-regions: 5
  • [2.290291] i915 device info: page-sizes: 211000
  • [2.292045] i915 device info: platform: ALDERLAKE_P

As expected, Intel will be using its new Gen 12 Xe iGPU with up to 32 EUs under its belt, which means there will be one Slice, two Sub-Slices, and 16 EUs each. This iGPU will have a third of the power of its highest version, so the PCH’s PCIe lines will only have 9 lanes.

What does this mean for an Ultrabook? Well, by updating the iGPU and with that number of EUs, Intel ensures that the encoding and decoding capabilities are the best it can offer for any current device, which includes support for AV1, H.264, H265, Dolby Vision and being able to play videos or streaming to 8K and 60FPS with ridiculous consumption.

  • [2.377090] i915 device info: slice total: 1, mask=0001
  • [2.379108] i915 device info: total subslice: 2
  • [2.380844] i915 device info: slice0: 2 subslices, mask=00000003
  • [2.383121] i915 device info: EU total: 32
  • [2.384684] i915 device info: EU per subslice: 16
  • [2.386481] i915 device info: has slice power gating: yes
  • [2.388535] i915 device info: has subslice power gating: no
  • [2.390652] i915 device info: has EU power gating: no

It’s a masterstroke to an industry where ARM was dominating with an iron fist and now not only has a tough competitor, it’s also far behind in terms of performance and possibly efficiency. Alder Lake-N It opens a new world to low consumption devices and above all to the fact that some such as Chromecast are going to become obsolete in the blink of an eye in view of the data offered.

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