Intel Alder Lake-N Makes an Appearance, Features Only Gracemont Cores

Intel’s Alder Lake family is apparently still growing and the latest leaks suggest that a new addition is on its way in the shape of the Alder Lake-N. This should be the most basic SKU of Alder Lake CPUs, as it’ll only have “small” Gracemont cores and no Golden Cove cores at all, unlike all of its other siblings. The oddities don’t stop here though, as these new CPUs won’t even have any PCIe lanes from the CPU itself, beyond the chipset interconnect.

It’s possible that these will be some kind of embedded parts, as Alder Lake-N is said to come with up to eight cores. The limitation of PCIe lines, of which apparently only a total of nine will be offered, is something that might make it less appealing for embedded systems, especially if it requires a separate chipset. It’s possible that Intel has designed these new SKUs for Chromebooks or other budget notebooks, but they’d have to be priced extremely affordably to be appealing, considering how cheap Chromebooks already are. The chips are also said to feature a full GT1 Gen 12.2 GPU with up to 32 EUs, so graphics performance should at least be comparable to Alder Lake-S desktop parts. We’d hazard a guess that the GPU clocks will be a lot lower though.