Alleged Intel Core i5 Alder Lake-S CPU Leaks Without Gracemont Efficiency Cores

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Intel just gave us an extensive rundown of architectural details for its Alder Lake processors, including the fact that high-end SKUs will top out with 8 Golden Cove performance cores and 8 Gracemont efficiency cores. Only the performance cores have Hyper-Threading enabled, which means that a hypothetical Core i9-12900K would have a total of 16 cores and 24 threads.

However, an interesting new Alder Lake-S desktop processor just appeared in UserBenchmark, and it shows 6 cores and 12 threads. That would indicate this particular SKU is lacking the Gracemont efficiency cores. According to WCCFTech, this would either be a Core i5-12400 or Core i5-12500 processor without the "K" designation.

According to the benchmark results, the processor has a base clock of 2.6GHz and a turbo clock of 4.25GHz. This particular processor was paired with an LGA-1700 socket motherboard with 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory (instead of DDR5).

It's expected that there will be K-Series Core i5 processors higher up on the totem pole that will have the Gracemont cores enabled. These Core i5 processors would pair the 6 Golden Cove cores with 4 Gracemont cores. This would provide a total of 10 physical cores and 16 threads.

Intel Alder Lake processors are built on the Intel 7 process node, previously referred to as 10nm Enhanced Superfin. There will be three separate processor families aimed at Ultra Mobile, Mobile, and Desktop product families. In addition, Alder Lake processors will have the first consumer platform to support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 standards.

As we've seen in recent months, manufacturers are already prepared to unleash a swarm of DDR5 memory products. However, the first PCIe 5.0 SSDs will likely have to wait until 2022 with could max out at 16GB/sec throughput.