Alder Lake

• Golden Cove high-performance cores ("P-cores")
  • Dedicated floating-point adders[10]
  • New 6-wide instruction decoder (from 4-wide in Rocket Lake/Tiger Lake) with the ability to fetch up to 32 bytes of instructions per cycle (from 16)[10]
  • 12 execution ports (from 10)
  • 512 reorder-buffer entries (from 384)
  • 6-wide μOP allocations (from 5)
  • μOP cache size increased to 4K entries (up from 2.25K)
  • AVX-VNNI, a VEX-coded variant of AVX512-VNNI for 256-bit vectors
  • AVX-512 (including FP16) is present but disabled by default to match E-cores. On early revisions of microprocessors it still can be enabled on some motherboards with some BIOS versions by disabling the E-cores.[10][11] Intel has physically fused off AVX-512 on later revisions of Alder Lake CPUs.[12]
  • ~18% IPC uplift.[13]
• Gracemont power efficient cores ("E-cores")
  • Aggregated into 4-core modules with a shared L2 cache
  • 256 reorder-buffer entries (up from 208 in Tremont)
  • 17 execution ports (up from 12)
  • AVX2, FMA and AVX-VNNI
  • Skylake-like IPC.[13]
• New instruction set extensions[14]
• Up to 1 TB/s interconnect between cores[10]
• Intel Thread Director (only for CPUs with P and E cores), which is a marketing name for Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface (EHFI). This is a hardware technology to assist the OS thread scheduler with more efficient load distribution between heterogeneous CPU cores.[2] Enabling this new capability requires support in the operating system.
• 4–30 MB L3 cache[10]
• Cores:
  • up to 8 P-cores and 8 E-cores on desktop[13]
  • up to 6 P-cores and 8 E-cores on mobile (UP3 designs)[13]
  • up to 2 P-cores and 8 E-cores on ultra mobile (UP4 designs)[13]
  • only P-cores feature hyper-threading

• Intel Xe (Gen 12.2) GPU
• Up to 96 EU on mobile and 32 EU on desktop[10]

• LGA 1700 socket[15] for desktop processors
• BGA Type3 and Type4 HDI for mobile processors[2]
• 20 PCIe lanes from CPU
  • 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes[10]
  • 04 PCIe 4.0 lanes[10]
• Chipset link - DMI 4.0 ×8 link with Intel 600 series PCH chipsets
• DDR5, DDR4, LPDDR5, and LPDDR4 memory support
  • Up to DDR4-3200
  • Up to DDR5-4800
  • XMP 3.0[1]
  • Dynamic Memory Boost[1]
• Integrated Thunderbolt 4 and WiFi 6E support[16]

The P and E cores of Alder Lake CPUs report different CPUID models. As a result, this may cause issues with digital rights management systems that perceive the P and E cores as being separate computers, and falsely enforce license restrictions preventing a particular piece of software from being executed on more than one device at a time. Intel published a list of PC games it identified as having this compatibility issue, and stated that it was working with publishers to develop patches. Some of the games were identified by Intel as only having this bug on Windows 10, and functioning correctly on Windows 11 (with some of them dependent on Windows 11 patches scheduled to be released in November 2021).[18][19]

The Intel Game Dev Guide for Alder Lake also cautions against the use of undefined behavior in bitwise operations, as the two cores can act differently.[20]

Alder Lake's CPU topology has performance implications, especially for gaming environments where the developers are not used to NUMA setups. Microsoft added support for Intel Thread Director (ITD) in Windows 11.[10][21] A wide variety of inputs, including whether a process' window is in the foreground, feeds into the ITD.[22] The ITD can function to a lesser extent with the OS providing less or no cooperation.[23] Support in Linux is merged in kernel 5.18[24] but this alone is not sufficient until the kernel gets hints from userspace in order to schedule tasks to run on certain types of cores.

The CPU family no longer features Intel SGX which is a requirement for playing UltraHD Blu-Ray disks.[25]

• All the CPUs support up to 128 GB of DDR4-3200 or DDR5-4800 RAM in dual channel mode.[26]
• All the CPUs support 16x PCI Express Gen 5 and 4x PCI Express Gen 4 lanes, but support may vary depending on motherboard and chipsets.
• Some models feature integrated UHD Graphics 770, UHD Graphics 730 or UHD Graphics 710 GPU with 32/24/16 EUs and base frequency of 300 MHz.
• By default Alder Lake CPUs are configured to run at Turbo Power at all times and Base Power is only guaranteed when P-Cores/E-cores do not exceed the base clock rate.[10]
• Max Turbo Power: the maximum sustained (> 1 s) power dissipation of the processor as limited by current and/or temperature controls. Instantaneous power may exceed Maximum Turbo Power for short durations (≤ 10 ms). Maximum Turbo Power is configurable by system vendor and can be system specific.
• CPUs in bold below feature ECC memory support only when paired with a motherboard based on the W680 chipset.[27]

*By default, Core i9 12900KS achieves 5.5 GHz only when using Thermal Velocity Boost[28]