If the latest Intel Alder Lake rumors are to be believed, the hybrid big.LITTLE design gamble is likely to pay off big against AMD's Zen 3 CPU. The 12th generation Intel processors are due this year, and rumors that the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X will outperform them will be an impressive second consumer announcement for new CEO Pat Gelsinger.

This speculation about new specs originated from the Moore's Law is Dead YouTube channel.

To me, the important point revealed in this video is the weakest part of the Alder Lake equation: the LITTLE core potential.

The idea behind the Big.LITTLE hybrid design was coined by chip competitor Arm, and Intel is pairing two different new CPU architectures on a single chip. in Alder Lake, the main high-performance Core architecture and the latest and greatest of the Atom lineup of low-power cores.

Alder Lake will debut both Golden Cove (the larger core), updated from Tiger Lake's Willow Cove design, and the new Gracemont Atom core. has been suggested to improve IPC performance by about 20% compared to Willow Cove. [However, the Gracemont core is a bit more enigmatic, and many of us have simply dismissed it as wimpy silicon that would struggle to keep a browser open, let alone require Intel to provide multi-threaded processing power to match the 12-core power of AMD's powerful 5900X. But the Gracemont architecture is a much better choice. But the suggestion that the Gracemont architecture could offer the same kind of performance that Intel was previously pulling out of its Skylake chips (the basic chip layout of all chips up to Comet Lake) is potentially nothing more than a implication.

Eight of these Golden Cove cores will have HyperThreading, a combined 40% IPC improvement over Comet Lake (if the wind is blowing in its favor), and Gracemont backup as one would expect from the previous generation of Intel silicon. Alder Lake could be a very impressive piece of kit as it delivers CPU performance.

We have already seen engineering samples of the 16-core Alder Lake CPU in action, and Intel is also shipping both a Windows software development kit and SI upgrade kit for external testing.

This confirms other rumors that Alder Lake is being fast-tracked for a late summer release rather than a late 2021 launch.

In other words, the hardware is in place, but the arguably bigger question for Alder Lake is how Windows will actually see and assign work to these big and light cores.

We have long said that the Windows scheduler will be the key to ensuring that 12th generation chips maintain consistent high-end performance without developers having to write special code, and Intel, for all its shortcomings, is pretty good when it comes to software, so it will be interesting to see if the Windows scheduler will be able to handle the workloads that will be required for Alder Lake, The fact that hardware is already out for validation this early in 2021 certainly bodes well.