The big nucleus is gone! Intel 12th Generation Core N Series First Exposed: Only 8 Small Cores

Intel 12th Generation Core has introduced hybrid architectures for the first time in the mainstream field, including performance cores (P cores), energy efficiency cores (E cores), commonly known as large and small cores, based on Goden Cove and Gracmont CPU architectures, respectively.

The mobile terminal is a full line of size cores, and only the i5-12600K and higher-end i9 and i7 series on the desktop have two cores, and the i5, i3, Pentium, and Celeron series down are only large cores.

So, are there any products with only small cores? There really is, it's the Alder Lake-N series.

The Linux SOF open firmware code submitted by Intel shows that the Alder Lake-N series will come with up to 8 Small Cores of the Gracemont Architecture, or will it be divided into two groups, with each group of four sharing a 2MB L2 cache, and then all cores sharing a L3 cache.

It also integrates Xe LP architecture core display, 32 execution units, supports AV1, H.264, H.265 video codec, and supports 8K60 video output.

In fact, the Alder Lake-N series is an enhanced and upgraded version of the existing ultra-low-power Pentium and Celeron, and is expected to be included in the sequence of these two brands, for entry-level low-power desktops, notebooks, thin clients, NAS, embedded and so on.

Previous simulation tests have shown that the benchmark performance of the 12th generation Core small core is roughly equivalent to 66% of the large core, the game performance is equivalent to about 70-80%, and the power consumption is much lower.