Intel hints at October reveal date for its 10nm Alder Lake gaming CPUs

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Intel die

Leaks and rumours on Intel’s 12th gen Alder Lake chips are coming through thick and fast right now, but it looks like we finally have a more accurate reveal date to go by thanks to the Intel Accelerated keynote on Monday.

During the event, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger set a date for the next big announcement from the company, called ‘Intel Innovation’. This’ll run between October 27 and 28, and he referred to it as a ‘hybrid’ event – suggesting a link back to the hybrid big.LITTLE architecture we’ll see on the future 12th gen chips. Earlier rumours set these chips for a November release, and with no other big announcements around that time planned, it seems likely that this is the event where Alder Lake will be unveiled, though this is unconfirmed as of yet.

However, we can expect a delay between the announcement and when the chips are available for purchase. If Rocket Lake was anything to go by, its unveil on 16 March was followed by availability on 30 March, so we might not be waiting too long.

This keynote confirmed that Alder Lake will move from the 14nm node used on Rocket Lake to a new 10nm process. However, Intel will refer to its 10nm chips as ‘Intel 7’, putting them in line with AMD’s 7nm Zen 3 CPUs.

We expect AMD to continue pushing ahead of Intel with a smaller process, as its Zen 4 CPUs could arrive next year on a 5nm node. Even still, Intel’s new naming scheme does make some sense when you consider performance. A leaked benchmark suggests the future 10nm i9 12900K flagship can still outperform AMD’s Zen 3 flagship, even though the latter uses a smaller 7nm node.