Intel’s Alder Lake Mobile Line-Up Leaks Through Geekbench

Intel’s mobile Alder Lake line-up has just leaked in great detail and, frankly, it looks mighty promising! Not that we expected anything less from “team blue’s” latest and greatest architecture — especially after all the headlines they’ve made for finally catching up to (and even surpassing) AMD.

It’s been a while since the last time Intel had something truly alluring to offer, but that’s about to change in a myriad of ways! Alder Lake has already made waves on the desktop side of things and, by the looks of it, much of the same is about to happen when it comes to laptops as well. We’re all dying to see what Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD have lined up for CES 2022 as their future products will not only affect the market in truly profound ways but they’ll also usher in a more competitive state of affairs and, by proxy, lower prices.

Intel was always very competitive in the laptop segment of the market, and that’s not going to change any time soon. Mobile Alder Lake SKUs will surely be mighty powerful but also pretty efficient, too. And while this is a well educated guess, it’s still too early to come to any definitive conclusion before seeing these CPUs in action!

In any case, January 4th can’t come soon enough!

[Source: Official slide from Intel]

Let’s Talk Specifics

The slide above is worth a million words. We have five different SKU segments each of which has its own thermal limitation — from 5-7W all the way up to 45-55W. The most efficient end of the spectrum will be used in Windows-based tablets, whereas the most power-hungry SKUs of the bunch will be reserved for “heavy duty” laptops and gaming behemoths. The range in the middle is geared towards thin and light ultrabooks but also entry-level machines where corners simply have to be cut.

All in all though, if this novel architecture delivers (and it very well could), buyers will be getting quite a lot for their money’s worth come Q1 2022! The schematic above also shows the number of Performance and Efficiency cores that each CPU will have, along with the number of GPU execution units (or EUs, for short). The higher the number the better the performance.

Additionally, Thunderbolt 4, PCIe Gen 5 and Wi-Fi 6E will all be supported, and the same goes for LPDDR5/DDR5 RAM — neither of which will come cheap.

Will Mobile Alder Lake CPUs Deliver?

Unfortunately, it’s still a bit too early to talk about performance. While most of these CPUs have leaked through Geekbench, they’re almost surely engineering samples which means they’re bound to perform a fair bit better once they hit the market.

Additionally, Geekbench didn’t do stellar job when it came to recognizing their hybrid architecture which has, in turn, affected their benchmark numbers. With that being said, we’re seeing phenomenal single- and multi-core performance across the board — these CPUs are powerful enough to give Apple’s M1 a run for its money!

All in all, while there’s still a whole lot that we don’t know, we’re definitely optimistic about Intel’s chances here. Hopefully this perennial tech giant will come out the gates swinging at next year’s CES!