With the launch of Intel Alder Lake processors, Intel has moved from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous processor design, where smaller, high-performance cores are mixed with high-performance cores to create a high-performance, high-performance processor for all kinds of workloads.
And it looks like Intel hasn’t finished adding new E-cores to its future products yet, as evidenced by the latest leaks. According to the BAPCO Crossmark benchmark database, future Intel Raptor Lake processors will have more E-cores than high-performance P-cores in the SoC design.
E-Cores are good for background tasks and adding more can potentially leave room for P-cores to run heavier workloads. For testing, we used configuration samples with eight P-cores and sixteen E-cores. Since large kernels are hyper-threaded, there are a total of 24 kernels with 32 threads.
The “RPL-S ADP-S DDR5 UDIMM OC CRB” platform was used with DDR5-4800 memory, indicating an early engineering sample with a likely unfinished memory controller. The Raptor Lake generation will also use the LGA 1700 socket, DDR5 memory and will be present in the desktop and mobile sector when it launches in Q4 2022. It will also use Intel 7’s semiconductor manufacturing process similar to Alder Lake.
