Intel Hybrid Technology was officially introduced when the company announced its Lakefield processors. These processors were designed to be used on mobile devices, offering reduced power consumption without sacrificing  performance. This same hybrid technology has been rumoured to come to desktop processors too, and Alder Lake-S might be its gateway.

Similarly designed to ARM's big.LITTLE core architecture, the Alder Lake-S core configuration has been shared by PTT. As per the picture, Alder Lake-S will feature up to 16 cores, from which 8 will be big ones, while the other 8 will be little ones.

With the latest leak from JZWSVIC (via @9550pro), it seems that the cores of the Alder Lake-S processors featuring Intel Hybrid Technology will “share the same instruction set and model specific registers”, regardless if they are big or little. On the other hand, the available instruction sets when the hybrid mode is enabled “is limited compared to the instruction sets available to the big cores”. If the big cores are the only enabled cores, AVX-512, Intel TS-NI and FP16 will be supported.

intel Alder Lake

8 big core+8 small core=disable AVX-512
8 big core=AVX-512https://t.co/LGFkKJWuI1 pic.twitter.com/Vku742CGsh

— HXL (@9550pro) July 13, 2020

For mobile devices, hybrid technology makes sense, and it's proven to work as we see in the mobile market. For desktops, however, it's still unclear what the benefits of adopting this type of technology will be. We will surely see how hybrid technology will be used in desktop processors once Alder Lake-S CPUs are available.

Intel Alder Lake-S processors should be released by 2021/2022.

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KitGuru says: How do you think Intel will take advantage of its Hybrid Technology on desktop processors? Will AMD follow a similar strategy?

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