That control is fully enabled in Windows 11, and Windows 10 can get most of the way there but doesn’t have all the bells and whistles for finer details – Linux support is in development.
The goal is that software that is not urgent runs on efficiency cores, but time-sensitive software runs on performance cores, and that has required a new management control between the processor and Windows has been developed to enable Alder Lake to work at its best. Each of the cores is designed differently to optimize for their targets, but supports the same software. The desktop processor silicon will have eight performance cores (P-cores) and eight efficiency cores (E-cores), the latter in two groups of four.
This hybrid design and new platform however has a number of rocks in the river to navigate: adapting Windows 10, Windows 11, and all sorts of software to work properly, but also introduction of DDR5 at a time when DDR5 is still not widely available. These new processors are the first widescale launch of a hybrid processor design for mainstream Windows-based desktops using the underlying x86 architecture: Intel has created two types of core, a performance core and an efficiency core, to work together and provide the best of performance and low power in a singular package. Today marks the official retail availability of Intel’s 12 th Generation Core processors, starting with the overclockable versions this side of the New Year, and the rest in 2022.