Yesterday, Intel announced its much-awaited 12th Gen Alder Hybrid CPUs, which are the first 10nm based CPUs by Intel for mainstream desktop and works with up to 8 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores. However, as of now upcoming Windows 11 is optimized for this unique big.LITTLE architecture, which we are already used to on our smartphones.
So, among many features announced for new Alder CPUs, Intel also announced a hardware-based scheduler that will have visibility into the type of threads being scheduled. Known as the Thread Director technology, this will first be available in Alder Lake CPUs and will work with Windows 11 to help prioritize tasks to the various cores based on their nature.
Much like how the small cores on our smartphones handle the basic workload while the high-performance one helps to boost high-workload or demanding apps. Similarly, Intel’s Alder Lake Hybrid CPUs will be used and helped by the Thread Director Technology to determine which task should be assigned to which cores/threads.
Here’s a quick video with the Intel Thread Director demo in action, thanks to Wccftech:
Here are some slides that show how the Intel Thread Director Technology works:
As you see in the slides, the technology helps schedule tasks between the Performance and Efficiency scores. It monitors the runtime instruction mix of each thread as well as the state of each core, provides runtime feedback to the OS and dynamically prioritizes the work to schedule depending upon external factors Power, TDP, etc.
So, indeed the tech used by Intel is a huge deal in making the upcoming 12th Gen Alder Lake processors work better with upcoming Windows 11.
