Alder Lake is an unexpected product for Intel, and we don't yet fully know what its hybrid approach will mean for desktop CPU performance and gaming. But today, with Alder Lake's appearance in our benchmark database ahead of its debut next year, we are at least a little closer to finding out.

The Alder Lake S chip was spotted by sharp-eyed TUM_APISAK on Twitter in the famously leaky SiSoft Sandra benchmark database. The listing shows a 16-core Alder Lake desktop chip with multiple threads per core, for a total of 32 threads, with 30MB of L3 cache and 10x 1.25MB L2.

Alder Lake will likely consist of eight Golden Cove cores (large cores) and eight Gracemont cores (small cores) in its maximum configuration. This hybrid architecture differs from the current Comet Lake 10th generation, which consists of a single Skylake-derived architecture.

The benefits of such a configuration are not yet clear for desktops, but it will be a much more efficient processor and will certainly offer better performance per watt than the current one.

As for memory, the Alder Lake S was suspected to be the first to support DDR5 memory. However, the SiSoft Sandra listing only supports "DRR4," which must be a typo or other misinformation; it appears that we will have to wait a bit longer to confirm DDR5's arrival.

Onboard graphics are reported as standard Intel UHD Graphics, with no real confirmation of GPU loadout. Below that, there is also a reference to "Alderlake-S Mobile Graphics," which is a bit off-putting given that codenames with "-S" usually indicate desktop chips, while H-series and U-series chips are seen more frequently in the mobile space.

The adoption of Sabrent Rocket 4.0 NVMe SSD drives at least hints at PCIe 4.0 compatibility with Alder Lake, which would put Intel on par with AMD Ryzen in the platform bandwidth department. It is also rumored that PCIe 5.0 support will be introduced with Alder Lake, so perhaps even this fully capable drive will be on the slow side for the new platform.

There are many questions about Alder Lake, but for us PC gamers, there is no more pressing question than its performance in gaming: whether Intel even intends to completely replace its desktop lineup with a new hybrid solution. We just don't know.

At the very least, we won't have to wait much longer for an answer; Alder Lake is scheduled for release in 2021.