Intel’s Alder Lake-N series processors debut with only Gracemont cores

The product lineup for Intel’s Alder Lake lineup is apparently still growing, and the latest leak suggests a new member called Alder Lake-N is on the way. This should be the most basic SKU of the Alder Lake CPUs, as it only has “small” Gracemont cores and no Golden Cove cores at all, unlike all the other siblings.

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But oddly, these newer models don’t even offer any PCIe lanes on their own, other than the few interconnected with the chipset. So Alder Lake-N could be some kind of embedded part, as Alder Lake-N is said to have up to eight cores.

Due to the aforementioned limitations of PCIe lines, only a total of nine will be available, which may also make it less attractive for embedded systems, especially if it requires a separate chipset.

There’s speculation that Intel might have designed these new SKUs for Chromebooks or other budget notebooks, but given how cheap Chromebooks are already, they have to be very cheap to be attractive.

The Alder Lake-N chips also feature a full GT1 Gen 12.2 GPU with 32 EUs, so graphics performance should be comparable to the Alder Lake-S desktop part, although the GPU will be clocked a lot lower.

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