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Captain_Yuri said:

I did want to lay out the upcoming CPU roadmap based on rumors and confirmations as it's going to get interesting

Late 2021	Early 2022	2022	Late 2022	2023	2023?
Alder Lake S	Zen 3 V-Cache	Raptor Lake	Zen 4	Meteor Lake	Zen 5
DDR5/PCIE 5/DDR4	DDR4/PCIE 4	DDR5/PCIE 5	DDR5/PCIE 4	DDR5/PCIE 5	DDR5/???
big.LITTLE	Chiplet	big.LITTLE	Chiplet	big.LITTLE	big.LITTLE
Intel 10nm	TSMC 7nm	Intel 10nm	TSMC 5nm	Intel 7nm	TSMC 3nm

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-raptor-lake-desktop-and-mobile-series-appear-on-a-leaked-roadmap

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-raphael-zen4-am5-presentation-from-march-2020-leaks-out

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-3nm-zen5-apus-codenamed-strix-point-rumored-to-feature-big-little-cores

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-zen4-and-rdna3-architectures-both-rumored-to-launch-in-q4-2022

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16725/amd-demonstrates-stacked-vcache-technology-2-tbsec-for-15-gaming?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

Now this is based on rumours so take it with a grain of salt.

Alder Lake S will certainly be the most interesting CPU to come out for a while. First CPU that not only does big.LITTLE but also has both DDR5 and PCIE5. AMD ironically has switched places where they will be behind in RAM and PCI-E technologies for essentially an entire year. Of course, the main question will be how powerful will Alder Lake S's big cores will be. If those Big cores turn out to be slower than Zen 3 refresh which will only have big cores, then Intel will still be in trouble. Still, a ton of the interesting times ahead for the PC CPU industry!

There have been some more information since then on the Intel chips, mostly curtesy to Moore's Law is Dead.

As it's already widely known, Alder Lake will use a big.LITTLE design. The big cores are based on Tiger Lake while the little ones are a new iteration of their Atom cores called Gracemont. Based on their Tremont predecessors, which already are in 10nm, I guess they will come with a base clock of ~2Ghz and a boost clock of 3-3.5Ghz.

And now for the core configurations, as it's going to be a little bit confusing. For desktop, we have:

i9: 8 big + 8 little cores

i7: 8+4 cores

i5: K versions: 6+4 cores, non-k versions: 6+0 cores

i3: only non-k versions coming, 4+0 cores

On laptops, Alder Lake will come with 8+8 (45W+), 6+4(35W+), 2+8(15W-28W) and 1+4(12W and below) core configurations.

Raptor Lake meanwhile, being just a refresh of Alder lake (same cores), but doubles the little cores to 16 on the i9, so ending up with a 8+16 configuration. How the other versions will look like is not yet known.

My take: It looks like Intel knows their cores draw too much power to run in their own spec. On desktop, that's not much of an issue yet (though OEMs and big clients certainly want to run within spec), but the low amount of big cores in lower power configurations really shows that they really need to go this route if they want to include more cores without the power budget exploding.