CPU-Z has a new version, adds support for Alder Lake chips, DDR5, XMP 3.0

This also partly shows that Alder Lake CPU models will almost certainly be released this fall, and naturally occupy a high position in the list of the best CPUs on the market at the moment.

The CPU-Z 1.97 update changelog has relatively detailed support for Core i9-12900K, Core i7-12700K, and Core i5-12600K processors. These are all top SKUs in the respective market segments they target, especially considering the clock speeds and multipliers unlocked for overclocking. Many leaked Intel documents have confirmed that Alder Lake will be on the new LGA1700 socket, which means that the new motherboards are also in the process of being ready for commercial launch.

The Alder Lake motherboards will be based on the 600-series chipset. As expected, Intel will provide a lot of chipsets to serve different user groups. Most notably is the case with the X699 chipset, which implies that Intel could return to the HEDT (high-end desktop) segment with Alder Lake.

On the Architecture Day 2021 event stage that took place not long ago, Intel mentioned that Alder Lake will be the first commercial CPU line to support the PCIe 5.0 interface and DDR5 memory. In theory, PCIe 5.0 can deliver up to 128GBps throughput, and should open the door to a new era of graphics cards and SSDs. But realistically speaking, the real benefits that PCIe 5.0 brings outside of data center, server or enterprise environments are still quite 'fuzzy'. Even the best graphics cards can't neutralize the PCIe 4.0 interface, so PCIe 5.0 is unlikely to represent a significant upgrade to the average user. SSDs, on the other hand, can take advantage of the extra bandwidth from PCIe 5.0.

As for DDR5, the leaked information about Alder Lake chip benchmarks with DDR5-4800 RAM is very impressive. But whether it can be favored by the market or not will still be a long way off. When DDR4 first came out, it wasn't much faster than the best DDR3 memory at the time. But over time, DDR4 has finally become the number one choice and delivers top performance. DDR5 will most likely go through the same process.

The changelog of the CPU-Z 1.97 update also confirms that Intel will be releasing a verbose version of Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) - XMP 3.0. JEDEC has specified a maximum of DDR5-6400 for DDR5, but in practice manufacturers can offer data rates up to DDR5-10000. Therefore, XMP 3.0 will come in handy for Alder Lake users who don't want to configure their overclocked DDR5 memory manually.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 25 August 2021