It’s been only a couple of months since Intel put out its 11th generation processors, codenamed “Rocket Lake”, but the Santa Clara company will be delivering another processor line as soon as this fall if recent rumors are to be believed.
Of course, we already knew that Intel was gearing up to launch its next-gen “Alder Lake” processors this year. Having fallen behind to AMD in the processor wars, with the Red Team now having the best gaming processor in the market, Intel really has to come up with something special in order to recapture the gaming crown.
And Intel, or Blue Team as the company is known to its fans, is breaking away from its traditional CPU architecture in order to deliver an hybrid, asymmetrical processor line which will boast two different types of cores: performance cores (named “Golden Cove” cores by Intel) and power-efficient cores (which Intel is calling “Gracemont” cores).
This should bring about quite an increase in performance, with leaked Intel slides claiming a performance increase in multithreaded tasks of up to 100 %, which is no mean feat. This definitely means anyone upgrading to an Alder Lake CPU this year should see a big jump in performance in their favorite games for sure, with leaked benchmarks showing plenty of promise.
That is, if Intel’s 12th gen processors actually land this year… As stated earlier, Alder Lake’s release is rumored to be this fall, with website Moore’s Law is Dead saying the launch will take place around Halloween this year, as was recently reported on TweakTown.
This means that come October (if this rumor is proven true) Intel’s new processors, based on the latest 10-nanometer technology, could be hitting retail. Also, the new motherboards needed to accommodate the Alder Lake processors will bring support for new technologies like PCI Express 5.0 and DDR5, the new memory standard which supports higher operating frequencies than the current DDR4.
The thing is, will there be enough supply of the new processors so that everyone who wants to buy one at launch is able to do so? Electronic devices such as consoles like the PS5 have been in short supply since the COVID-19 pandemic struck last year, and so has been the case with components like graphics cards, with PC gamers struggling to get hold of the latest Nvidia cards, as well as AMD ones.
Also, let’s not forget that Intel would be launching two processor generations in one year (if Alder Lake does come out in 2021) and how the company did a paper launch of its Coffee Lake processors back in 2017. These were almost impossible to buy at launch, leaving eager users waiting for months in order to upgrade their PCs.
But still, even if they cannot get hold of an Alder Lake processor at launch, PC technology enthusiasts also have something else to look forward to, as it’s rumored that Microsoft is planning to put out a new version of Windows this year.
It’s been almost six years since Windows 10 launched back in 2015, and Microsoft’s timing makes a lot of sense taking into account the new hybrid architecture that Alder Lake brings to the table.
You see, while Windows 10 is optimized to deal with processors that sport a certain number of homogeneous cores, it could trip up when faced with an Alder Lake processor sporting a mix of high performance and power efficient cores, with the former supporting multithreading and the latter only supporting one thread.
The next Windows Version comes with massive scheduling upgrades, and it seems to be coming out around Alder Lake K’s launch.
Not a coincidence people…
And yes – Microsoft will unveil “Windows 11” (Or whatever they call it) June 24th. It’s a new Windows.
— Moore’s Law Is Dead (@mooreslawisdead) June 3, 2021
That’s why according to the rumor emanating from the Moore’s Law is Dead website, Windows 11 (if that’s what the next version of Microsoft’s operating system is called) will feature “massive scheduling upgrades”, in order to make the most of Intel’s new CPUs.
Microsoft will seemingly reveal its next OS at an event on June 24, so it’s not long before we find out what the Redmond giant has in store for the next version of Windows, hopefully confirming support for Intel’s 12th gen Alder Lake features.
Either way, this looks like it could be an exciting year for technology enthusiasts and those who game on PC, that’s for sure.
Read more: Intel unveils 11th gen Core processors, teases Alder Lake CPUs