The future might be here sooner rather than later.

Because Intel’s next-gen, next-gen processors are already appearing on the SiSoft Sandra database.

Slated for release in 2022, this represents Intel’s path forward. Called Alder Lake, these processors will arrive following the 11th generation Rocket Lake that is on tap for next year. That could change pending a September 2 announcement from Intel though that would be a big surprise indeed.

It is also the processor destined to bring to the desktop Intel’s vaunted “Hybrid Technology” or the use of a larger CPU core in tandem with four smaller ones as PC Gamer is reporting.

In terms of design, the Alder Lake will employ a big.LITTLE configuration with a top-end processor of eight Golden Cove cores. The big.LITTLE design choice is seen as somewhat noteworthy. While it remains to be seen what Intel does with it, many industry watchers are somewhat perplexed by what they are hearing thus far about Alder Lake.

So why is this showing up on SiSoft this early?

Well, some people speculate that the Alder Lake processor could be coming out sooner than 2022 – like in 2021 to be exact. Thus far people are trying to read the tea leaves about what Alder Lake will be able to do based upon what we know about Rocket Lake.

That’s an inexact science at best. Another issue is that, as noted above, we won’t see Rocket Lake on PCs this year which makes a 2021 release for Alder Lake concurrent pretty much with Rocket Lake. Given that, the 2022 timeframe seems to make more sense but who knows. As we noted above, everything could change with a surprise from Intel on September 2.

TechRadar published the following rumored specs for Rocket Lake nearly one month ago.

The website cited the following:

Tech Radar continues: “In addition, this latest leak details the processor’s built-in iGPU, which reportedly sports 32 Compute Units, with a core clock frequency of 1.15GHz and 6.33GB of VRAM. However, although the iGPU is expected to be using the Intel Xe graphics architecture, early benchmarking scores don’t look promising.”

Launching two generations in one year would be a big deal, it wouldn’t be unprecedented for Intel to do. Dave James of PC Gamer points to the Broadwell generation as one example of this.

What is undoubtedly clear is that Alder Lake will be a significantly different processor than those previously released by Intel.

What do you think? Do you follow Intel as a company? How about its tech compared to its competition? Let us know your thoughts on this story in the comments section below.

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