Intel unveiled the Lakefield architecture at CES 2019
Intel 12th Gen chips could have a mix of ‘big’ and ‘little’ cores
Fresh off the CES 2019 boat, we reported early last year that Intel was working on a new chip-stacking architecture called Lakefield along with the 10th Gen Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs. While Intel has yet to deliver the latter, it has been working on its proprietary Lakefield architecture in an attempt to bring ‘big’ and ‘little’ CPU cores together in the same stack, the same way ARM has with its big.LITTLE architecture. According to a recent report by TechRadar, this new project could give Intel an upper hand over AMD in its 12th Gen CPU line-up.
Intel Lakefield is a hybrid architecture that pairs one ‘big’ performance-oriented 10-nanometre Sunny Cove core with four ‘little’ efficiency-oriented 10-nanometre Atom cores in order to achieve a finer balance between performance and power efficiency, the same way many mobile processors on smartphones currently do. Lakefield was originally planned for use in ultra-low power designs but Intel will reportedly use it in its upcoming Alder Lake-S desktop CPUs.
Citing PTT and Videocardz as its sources, the report suggests Intel could bring the Lakefield architecture to its 12th Gen CPU line-up and topple competitor AMD, which announced its Ryzen 4000 H-series processors for laptops earlier this year. The report goes on to say that Alder Lake-S could consist of three configurations, two of which are 8+8+1 (8 ‘big’ cores, 8 ‘little’ cores, and 1 integrated GPU) configurations of 125W and 80W TDP. The last one could be a more affordable 6+0+1 (6 ‘big’ cores, no ‘little’ cores, and 1 integrated GPU) configuration.
Though Intel has yet to introduce officially the 10th Gen Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs that it unveiled at CES 2019, they were recently spotted in a leaked Dell PC ad. The new CPUs are expected to make their way to Dell’s 2020 XPS Tower and XPS Tower Special Edition desktops. The most sophisticated model in the 10th Gen Comet Lake-S desktop CPU series is expected to be the Core i9-10900K, which features 10 cores and a max turbo clock speed of around 5GHz.
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