[Picture Credit: Intel]
MUHAMMAD-MAHDI HIRJI
Intel has just announced their latest 12th gen silicon, the Alder Lake chip, meaning this is the perfect time to discuss how such devices work. This chip is unlike past processors, as Intel has changed their product slightly. But before discussing this, let us learn about the basics of a CPU first.
A CPU (Central Processing Unit) is essentially the brains of a computer. It executes instructions sent by a computer program. It is built from the ground up from transistors, allowing it to make the quick calculations needed to run a program, or even an entire operating system. Transistors are effectively a group of gates that run on binary code. Binary code is the format in which the computer receives its instructions, represented in 1s or 0s (1 being open/on, 0 being closed/off). This is, at the lowest level, how everything is done on a device, be it watching a video, or sending an email.
One of the most common advancements in CPU technology is being able to make the transistors smaller, meaning you can have more of them in a core (essentially many small CPUs on a single chip; when the CPU was first invented, it only had 1 core, but now, there are up to 64 cores in a CPU). Therefore, you can run more CPU-intensive tasks on a computer.
This led to a type of chip called a System on a Chip (SoC), used in phones and tablets, which have essentially the same architecture as a CPU, but act in a more power efficient way. However, in November 2020, Apple put an upgraded SoC called the M1 chip, based on their A14 Bionic SoC, in a laptop. This not only meant the laptop was more power efficient, but also more powerful than many top end CPUs, thanks to the extreme optimisation between their SoC and their operating system. Because of this, Apple laptop sales have skyrocketed, and so Intel decided to follow in their footsteps.
So, with Intel’s latest 12th generation Alder Lake CPU’s, Intel has not only optimised their chip for the latest edition of Windows, Windows 11, which will soon be released, but also made a chip that is a mix between a SoC and a CPU. They have done this by using not only "Performance Cores", the normal cores found in a CPU, but also "Efficiency Cores". Efficiency Cores are used for lightweight tasks (therefore they can be smaller - see leading image - and hence less power intensive). The Performance Cores do not have to be used for these tasks, making the task consume less power.
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Muhammad-Mahdi Hirji is a Year 7 Computer Science student at Watford Boys, who's passionate about the hardware that sits below the tasks we perform every day.