CREDIT: Intel Corporation (Alder Lake Mobile Chip)
There’s been an absolute fire lit under Intel by AMD. After years of phoning it in with each boring new generation of Intel CPUs, the Team Blue got a rude awakening when AMD not only made CPUs with more cores for less money, but with better IPC (instructions per clock), which had been Intel’s last bastion.
Suddenly Intel pulled a rabbit out of the hat with Alder Lake, a revolutionary hybrid x86 CPU design that offers the best of all worlds for mainstream and enthusiast users. What Alder Lake didn’t do was offer a slam-dunk alternative to AMD Treadripper CPUs. These chips offer massive core counts and amazing professional CPU power in a desktop form factor. There’s no need for multi-socket motherboards or exotic cooling, making them a favorite of prosumer and professional users alike.
Now, there are rumours of an Alder Lake-X CPU with core counts as high as 56!
Where Do the Rumours Come From?
All computer hardware rumors should be taken with a pinch of salt, so it’s worth talking about why they exist. There are two parts to this rumor: first that Alder Lake-X is coming soon, and second that it will be a 56-core chip.
The first part of the rumor is largely based on an update to AIDA 64, which is a system information and diagnostic application favored by hardware geeks and computer technicians.
There’s a line in the 6.60.5944 beta release notes for the applications that reads “preliminary support for Intel Alder Lake-X CPU”, which people took to mean the release of these products must be immanent. Whether someone is jumping the gun here is unknown.
Speculating About Alder Lake-X
The second part of the rumor is harder to get a handle on. It’s not exactly clear where the idea that these CPUs are 56-core parts comes from. For example, Hardware Times writes that it will be 56 cores spread over four dies. Each die will have 20 cores with one disabled to improve yields. However, that article doesn’t offer a source for this despite being linked to by other outlets.
