Intel announced the launch of about 60 SKUs based on Alder Lake Silicon. The number of different types of processors that will be available, however, remained unclear.
During an MSI Insider stream, the company announced that the desktop Alder Lake CPUs will be available in two different variants, either with 8 GoldenCove and 8 Gracemont cores or only 6 GoldenCove cores as performance cores. 8 GoldenCove is known as the ‘Big Core’, whereas the Efficient Core, 6 GoldenCove is best known as ‘Small Core’ or ‘Atom Core’.
The 6P+0E die has not yet been brought into use in any of the previously announced products. However, it is expected to make a debut in early 2022 when the non-K core series and Pentium CPUs will be launched.
The area of the 8+8 variant is 215 mm², while that of 6+0 has been recorded at 163 mm². According to MSI employees, efficient cores of this die have not been enabled.
It should significantly be noted that these two dies are not the only Alder lake silicon which are to be manufactured. It has already been confirmed by Intel that two mobile variants 6+8 and 2+8 are already planned for Alder Lake-P and Alder Lake-M series. They are expected not to be in the market before next January.
Interestingly, the real die of the Alder Lake-P CPU has been shown by Intel for the first time and Andrea’s Schilling measured it quickly from HardwareLuxx. The size estimated by him is around 217.2mm². Due to this, the mobile chip is slightly bigger than the Alder Lake-S 8+8 die. The main reason behind this is that its mobile version is equipped with 96 graphic cores. In contrast, the latter comes with 32.
It has also been mentioned by MSI that due to the existence of two different desktop dies, a problem for cooling manufacturers may arise. The reason explained by them is the placement of hotspot which is not placed in the same spots as measured by MSI.
Via MSI Insider