Intel Alder-Lake S hybrid desktop CPU benchmark has been spotted

Intel's upcoming Core Alder Lake-S desktop processor has appeared on the SiSoft SANDRA benchmark database, as spotted by regular roving tech eye, TUM_APISAK.

The company's 12th generation desktop chip is expected to be the first Hybrid desktop processor so it'll be a little bit different from what we usually see. Alder Lake-S is a new microarchitecture so there's no guarantee that it's properly detected by the database. For instance, the information is suggesting that it has 16 cores and 32 threads while other reports suggest it's more likely to be 24 threads. That suggests that the Gracemont cores don't offer Hyperthreading which is why things are being misreported on Sandra. 

Either way, we know that the 16 cores are an equal mixture of Golden Cove and Gracemont cores thanks to previous information from Intel. Effectively, it's meant to work out as eight high-performance cores with eight smaller high-efficiency cores which should work well together.

The database entry also suggests clock speeds of around 1.4GHz, and ten 1.25MB L2 caches with current rumours suggesting that this may be broken down as eight 1.25MB for the Golden Cove cores and two for the high-efficiency Gracemont cores. There's also 30MB of L3 cache. General indications are that the iGPU inside the Alder-Lake S comes with 256 shader cores at 1.15GHz.

The idea behind Alder-Lake-S is that it will take advantage of the extremely low power of the Gracemont cores any time that your system isn't in need of a lot of oomph. On the surface, it's not the kind of thing that high-end users will be interested in sounding more like something for an average consumer, but it's hard to tell right now until we actually see what Intel has planned. 

Alder Lake-S is also expected to offer other platform features such as DDR5 RAM support and PCIe 5.0 too. Essentially, it's a little too soon to know exactly what the hybrid design will be like and how full benchmarks will work out compared to the competition. Still, it's interesting to see things slowly emerge courtesy of benchmark database leaks.