Intel Alder Lake
According to an article published by Hardware Times, it appears that the Intel 600 series chipset, made for Alder Lake, will not support the PCI Express 5.0 interface. The information comes from a PCI-SIG certification, according to which future chipsets dedicated to Intel processors will maximum support the PCI Express 4.0 interface in a 4x configuration, which means that the chips will have support for PCIe 5.0 only on the lines of the CPU.We don't know why the Santa Clara giant dropped PCIe 5.0 support from 600-series chipsets, possibly due to cost or capacity issues. Either way, this could be a winning strategy for keeping motherboard prices lower. When the PCIe 4.0 interface first debuted on the market, there was a general increase in the cost of motherboards due to the need for higher quality materials and more PCB layers to ensure stable speeds. This, in particular, had distinguished AMD's X570 platform, which offers full support for PCI Express 4.0 on both the CPU and chipset lines. We can only imagine that the same thing will happen with PCIe 5.0 and will likely get even worse, since it is significantly faster than the previous version.
But with Intel supporting PCIe 5.0 only on the CPU, motherboard prices they may not be that high. It is much easier for manufacturers to make items with one or two PCIe Gen 5.0 slots at most than it is to design the entire card to support PCIe 5.0. Furthermore, most consumers and prosumers rarely manage to saturate the PCIe 4.0 interface right now, even with NVMe SSDs, and we don't expect this to change in the foreseeable future. For this reason, such a choice seems rather sensible.
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Intel Alder Lake could launch early, timed with the next version of Windows
Microsoft may be using Intel’s 12th-gen processor platform, also known as Alder Lake, to launch its next version of Windows this fall. While the 12th-gen Alder Lake was previously expected to arrive in November on desktops, Intel may be moving up the launch of Alder Lake for desktop to October, according to the latest rumors, to coincide with the debut of the next release of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
“The next Windows Version comes with massive scheduling upgrades, and it seems to be coming out around Alder Lake K’s launch,” Moore’s Law is Dead, which has a YouTube channel with the same name, wrote in a tweet. “Not a coincidence people … And yes — Microsoft will unveil ‘Windows 11’ (or whatever they call it) June 24. It’s a new Windows.”
Intel had previewed Alder Lake earlier this year at CES, noting that the new silicon will come with a hybrid design. Unlike previous desktop processors, Alder Lake will utilize a heterogeneous mix of cores, combining high-efficiency and high-performance cores. If the new launch timing is accurate, Microsoft and Intel likely would have worked closely together, according to Hot Hardware, to optimize the new release of Windows for the 12th-gen platform. Early leaks suggest that Alder Lake will deliver a 20% performance improvement over prior designs on single-threaded performance. The performance uplift goes as high as 100% for multithreaded performance.
In addition to the new hybrid architecture, Alder Lake will also support DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0.
In terms of the next release of Windows, Microsoft had sent out a teaser that it will unveil its new release on June 24. The software giant based in Redmond, Washington, did not specify if the release will be a continuation of Windows 10 or if it will shift to a new numbering scheme and call it Windows 11 — or perhaps something else entirely.
Though Microsoft will announce and preview what’s to come with this next release of Windows, the operating system may not be commercially available until the fall, so the timing meshes well with the rumored earlier-than-anticipated launch of Alder Lake. Some are expecting that this new iteration of Windows will bring the much-anticipated Sun Valley visual overhaul to the platform, and if accurate, Alder Lake will be among the first crop of new processors to take advantage of all the changes coming to Microsoft’s operating system.
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