Intel's 12th-Gen Alder Lake chip will bring the company's hybrid architecture, which combines a mix of larger high-performance cores paired with smaller efficiency cores, to desktop x86 PCs for the first time. That represents a massive strategic shift as Intel looks to regain the uncontested performance lead against AMD's Ryzen 5000 series processors that have taken the lead in our CPU Benchmarks hierarchy, not to mention Apple's M1 processors that feature a similar hybrid design and come with explosive performance improvements of their own. Intel's Alder Lake brings disruptive new architectures and reportedly supports features like PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 that leapfrog AMD and Apple in connectivity technology, but the new chips come with significant risks. It all starts with a new way of thinking, at least as far as x86 chips are concerned, of pairing high-performance and efficiency cores within a single chip. This is a well-traveled design philosophy that powers billions of Arm chips, … [Read more...] about Intel 12th-Gen Alder Lake Release Date, Benchmarks, Specifications, and All We Know