More Intel Alder Lake details leak, up to 16 core Alder Lake-S, W680 chipset

Intel's Alder Lake is the company's upcoming 12th gen 'Core i' series processor lineup and over the last few months, leaks related to it have been pouring in. Adding to the list of leaks is today's new information that we get regarding the Alder Lake-S processors. HXL on Twitter, who is a known leaker, has posted what appears to be an Intel roadmap for current and upcoming Workstation processors.

The roadmap has Alder Lake-S on it listed as an entry-level workstation or a high-end desktop (HEDT) part. It will pack up to 16 cores and will require a new W680 chipset, on the LGA 1700 socket. This new chipset will allegedly succeed the current W580 chipset built for Rocket Lake-S processors. For those wondering, the W series chipsets indicate Intel's HEDT motherboard parts.

As per this roadmap, Alder Lake-S should be launching sometime around Q3 or Q4 of this year which is a bit earlier than we had initially anticipated given that Alder Lake is rumored to debut with DDR5 memory support. However, as we have learned from a previous unconfirmed leak, Alder Lake may retain DDR4 compatibility as well in lower-end 600-series Intel chipsets.

Putting the two leaks together to make sense of them, it seems Intel will continue with DDR4 on lower Alder Lake chips which will be for the mass market and only enthusiast-level parts like Alder Lake-S get support for faster, next-gen DDR5 memory as the supply for the next-gen memory tech will likely remain constrained for some time post-launch.

Source and image: HXL (Twitter)