Today we have another tidbit leak for you all, this time about Alder Lake’s M and P variants and their power consumption. For those who do not know, Alder Lake is a 10nm CPU coming out in 2021 or 2022 and will be present in both mobile and desktop, unlike all prior 10nm CPUs which were solely in mobile form factors. It is also Intel’s second hybrid architecture CPU, meaning that it uses both Cove cores and Atom cores (also referred to as big and little cores).
In the charts below you will find not only the current power consumption figures in milliwatts for both Alder Lake variants (as well as Lakefield and Tiger Lake U), but also the power consumption targets Intel hopes to achieve with Alder Lake by the time it launches. However, just like our recent A6000 leak, we cannot give exact figures; all figures in the charts are rounded and approximated. We also can’t specify the benchmarks run on the CPUs, but we will say that they are fairly light benchmarks that include both real world and synthetic applications. One final note is that these measurements are from the SoC alone, not an entire system.
Let’s start off with Alder Lake M. This variant is seemingly a successor of sorts to Lakefield, not just a lower end model of Alder Lake. The idle power consumption is far better on Alder Lake M than Lakefield, with Lakefield consuming almost three times the power. Alder Lake M matches power consumption in two benchmarks while using a fair bit more in another. However, as you can see in the chart below, Alder Lake M currently isn’t meeting its benchmark power consumption targets which are much lower than Lakefield’s. Intel is certainly working on reducing the power consumption of Alder Lake M and if they succeed it could be much better than Lakefield.
I need to preface the Alder Lake P figures with one important note: this Alder Lake P processor is equipped with two Cove cores, eight Atom cores, and the faster iGPU variant. By relying on so many Atom cores, Intel is able to greatly improve power consumption in everything but idle. Current benchmarks show this Alder Lake P processor beating Tiger Lake U by a decent margin. But these figures are far above the power consumption targets; should Intel reach their goal, Alder Lake P would draw about half the power of Tiger Lake U depending on the TDP configuration.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any power efficiency metrics to show, which would be useful in determining if the new hybrid approach is really worthwhile. The current power consumption figures are promising and the targets seem ambitious, at least. Alder Lake’s success really hinges on the hybrid approach working seamlessly and without issue.
