Early engineering samples of Intel's next CPU design, codenamed "Alder Lake," have been released and look as appealing as anyone could hope for. The engineering samples are posted on Igor's Lab and boast a completely new architecture, a 16-core, 24-thread model utilizing Intel's 10nm manufacturing process.

Alder Lake uses a big.LITTLE design similar to that found in many ARM-based phones and tablets. The large Golden Cove core is similar to that found in current CPUs, and the addition of the smaller Gracemont core, the equivalent of an Atom core, makes the overall design more efficient.

One might wonder about the disparity between the number of cores and threads, but that is because the Gracemont core does not have hyperthreading, whereas the Golden Cove core does. Thus, the larger core doubles the number of threads, while the smaller core does not. Thus, 16 cores will have 24 threads.

Engineering samples are not final silicon, but they are a good way to make sure everything is logically correct with the new architecture. The operating frequency is not finalized at this time, but as expected, the Core-1800 has a relatively low base clock of 1,800 MHz. It is difficult to expect this from the new release. In fact, when it was first released, the base clock was expected to be much higher than what is currently available (at least for the Golden Cove core).

The good news is that the turbo clocks for this 16-core, 24-thread chip appear to be a bit more in line with what we would expect: the Atom cores can reach 3.4 GHz with one to four cores and 3 GHz with five to eight smaller cores. [Alder Lake will not only introduce this new hybrid architecture, but will also be the first consumer processor to support PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory (up to DDR5-4800). The chip will also support PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 RAM, but it is up to the motherboard manufacturer to decide which support makes the most sense.

Alder Lake is a different architecture and requires a new LGA 1700 socket. High-end Z690 motherboards are expected to support DDR5, while lower-end motherboards may stick with DDR4.

The fact that engineering samples are already available could be a good indication that Intel plans to offer 12th generation CPUs within the timeframe set for late 2021.