For Hot Chips 33, Intel has announced further details on Alder Lake, which complete the overall picture and characterize the performance hybrid. The focus was on understanding the cooperation between the P and E cores and the new hardware scheduler.
The most interesting thing is the scaling from the E-Cores to the P-Cores depending on the selected scenario, which Intel only disclosed to a limited extent last week as part of the architecture presentation by Alder Lake (ComputerBase report). The “Golden Cove” performance core is still in a completely different league, it delivers over 50 percent more performance than a single E-Core, code-named “Gracemont”. But depending on the chosen scenario and the market environment, more e-cores make more sense: Intel explicitly names the ultra-mobile notebook with the smallest BGA package. Here, two fast P-cores are paired with eight E-cores. They take up roughly the same space as 4 P-Cores, but deliver 50 percent more performance in multi-threaded scenarios.
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Intel Alder Lake (Image: Intel)
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Intel Alder Lake 
Intel Alder Lake 
Intel Alder Lake 
Intel Alder Lake The fact that all of this works is due to the new hardware scheduler, on which Intel, as revealed for the first time a few days ago, has great importance. It monitors the threads and the status of the individual cores in the nanosecond range. According to its own information, Intel has evaluated countless applications via telemetry and, in the end, promises great things that will result from the cooperation between the P and E cores. Divided into four basic classes, each setting is available for the E and P cores. The decision is made based on both performance and energy consumption; a P-Cores can still be more efficient under certain circumstances, as it simply completes the selected tasks much faster than the E-Cores.
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Intel Alder Lake (Image: Intel)
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Intel Alder Lake 
Intel Alder Lake 
Intel Alder Lake 
Intel Alder Lake 
Intel Alder Lake 
On the basis of the examples presented by Intel, this works perfectly, not surprisingly, the assignment and the change from P to E cores and back works. Intel even shows a diagram of what it would look like without the Thread Director – the worst case. In the end it is a collaboration between hardware and software, Intel names Windows 11 as the first optimized operating system.
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Intel Alder Lake (Image: Intel)
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Intel Alder Lake 
p class = “p text-width”> Nevertheless, certain questions and skepticism remain today, which can only be finally clarified with samples in the hands of the editorial team. Because as already written a week ago: Alder Lake probably stands and falls solely with the hardware scheduler.