Intel leaks show next-gen desktop CPUs with hybrid “big.little” design
It looks like big.little CPU design—an architecture that includes both fast, power-hungry cores and slower, more power-efficient cores—is here to stay in the x86_64 world, according to unverified insider information leaked by wccftech and AdoredTV.
At Intel's 2021 Architecture day, the company confirmed that its upcoming Alder Lake (12th generation) processors will use a mixture of performance and efficiency cores. This brings the company's discontinued 2020 Lakefield design concept firmly into the mainstream.
Big.little designs run time-sensitive tasks on bigger, hotter performance cores while running background tasks on slower but much less power-hungry cores. This architecture is near-universal in the ARM world—which now includes Apple M1 Macs as well as Android and iOS phones and tablets—but it's far less common in the x86_64 "traditional computing" world. Intel's Lakefield architecture only lasted one year and only consisted of two products—the i5-L16G7 and i3-L13G4. Market demand was almost nonexistent for Lakefield, likely due to a poor mixture of performance and efficiency cores—both Lakefield CPUs offered only a single performance core, backed by four efficiency cores.
