Not all instructions available on little cores of Intel Alder Lake-S

VideoCardz reports about some new documents about Intel's Alder Lake-S that are circulating on the web. The information seems to be a leak of internal Intel documents and it confirms that the future Alder Lake-S will have an up to 8+8 core configuration in an ARM big.LITTLE like design.

Expected to be released in the 2021 or 2021 timeframe, Alder Lake will feature Golden Cove cores in combination with energy-efficient Gracemont cores.

The documents from Intel indicate Alder Lake-S will use Hybrid Technology. The big and small cores share the same instruction set and model specific registers, but some instruction sets are available only when the big cores are enabled. This concerns AVX-512, Intel TSX-NI, and FP16 support. The Intel document says these instructions are not available when hybrid computing is switched to enabled. It's unknown whether this is a dynamic OS-level feature or something that has to be configured in the BIOS.

Alder Lake-S will likely be branded as Intel's 12th Gen Core. A new motherboard will be required as this generation will switch to the LGA1700 socket. LGA1700 is rumored to be longer-lasting, with a lifespan of at least three CPU generations. Previous leaks indicate future generations on LGA1700 may support PCI Express 5.0 and DDR5.

intel Alder Lake

8 big core+8 small core=disable AVX-512
8 big core=AVX-512https://t.co/LGFkKJWuI1 pic.twitter.com/Vku742CGsh

— HXL (@9550pro) July 13, 2020