If you’ve been holding off on upgrading to a new Intel desktop CPU for a while now, the latest report from a prominent hardware leaker may be the news you’ve been waiting for. The highly-anticipated Alder Lake lineup from Intel now reportedly has a release date of October 25. Just in time for some high-performance spooky gaming during Halloween.
Moore’s Law is Dead revealed the news on his latest Q&A YouTube livestream among discussing various other behind-the-scenes industry happenings. October 25 does seem like a realistic timeframe to expect Alder Lake, though previous rumors suggested a September release date. Things have a way of getting delayed these days though, so a single month delay to October shouldn’t come as a surprise or be too difficult to stomach.
It’s all falling into place
We now know that Microsoft also plans to release a new version of Windows at some point later this year. The new version of Windows will likely be optimized to work with Intel’s radically different architecture. Aside from that, countless memory manufacturers have now confirmed that DDR5 products will launch this year. Everything seems to be circulating around Intel right now, and there’s good reason why.
Intel quite literally showed us Alder Lake earlier this year. Maybe we’ll actually see some numbers soon. Doing so at the Microsoft Windows event wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Alder Lake will not only mark a departure from the 14nm silicon that’s been in use in Intel products since 2014, it will mark Intel’s first significantly different architecture since Skylake. At least as far as most of us gamers are concerned. Intel CPUs will soon operate on denser, more energy-efficient 10nm silicon and operate with a mix of big and little cores, similar to that made by ARM. If everything works out as planned, this should be the biggest jump in gaming performance that we’ve seen in years, at least on the CPU side of things.
We’re hoping for the best for Intel, but AMD definitely won’t sit idly by while Intel catches up in performance. Team Red recently showed off a Zen 3 Ryzen CPU with 3D stacked L3 cache (V-Cache). The upgrade allowed a 5900X to kick performance up to new highs in a number of games. With a working Intel Alder Lake release date now on the table, it’s going to be an exciting next few months in the PC gaming hardware space. The healthy competition is certainly welcome.
