Following the recent leak of Windows 11, rumors are rife. The public release of a near-final version of the forthcoming operating system has shown some fascinating new possibilities. More information emerges as the stolen ISO is tested, including signs that Microsoft is working on Windows 11 for Intel’s Alder Lake and Lakefield hybrid processors.
The successor to Intel’s Lakefield hybrid CPUs, Intel Alder Lake, is rumored to have the same big.LITTLE design. This means it will have a mix of cores, some of which are optimized for high performance and others for great efficiency. This is a technology that is already used in some mobile devices, but with the release of Alder Lake, it will likely reach a larger PC market.
Many Windows customers have been asking if the new OS will be geared for the next Intel Core Alder Lake processors. Testers used the Intel Core Lakefield, which is currently Intel’s sole hybrid CPU series, to find out more. A closer examination of Windows 11 reveals that the operating system already has some changes tailored to hybrid Intel CPUs.
According to studies performed on a Lakefield Core i7-L16G7 processor, it appears that switching to Windows 11 will benefit Lakefield CPUs. In multithreaded testing, Windows 11 improved performance by up to 5.8%, and in single-thread testing by up to 2%. Another test demonstrated that Windows 10 outperformed Windows 11 in single-core operations by up to 8.2 percent, while a third test revealed that Windows 10 outperformed Windows 11 in digital content production, which is likely due to the lack of dedicated drivers in Windows 11.
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Lakefield CPUs have a low power consumption. While Alder Lake is expected to deliver a large increase in core count, Lakefield processors aren’t particularly noteworthy. They have only one large core and four smaller cores. However, both of these processor series’ architectures are anticipated to be comparable, which speaks well for Alder Lake.
Windows 11 is believed to include a fully redesigned start menu, a Windows dark mode, multitasking improvements, and WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) 3.0 support, among other things. Everything now points to Windows 11 as Microsoft’s “major reveal” for this year, which was first rumored to be an update to Windows 10.
The fact that Microsoft is optimizing for hybrids indicates that Windows 11 will support the Intel Alder Lake architecture in the future. With Alder Lake due to release this fall, it’s plausible that Microsoft is preparing some announcements of its own to coincide with the release. More information will most likely be revealed during the upcoming “what’s next for Windows” presentation