Mini-ITX ?
Er… With its "infinite Tau", this first batch of Alder Lake CPU essentially have a
TDP of 241 W (now called MTP). I wouldn't put that in a small case. And, at that pace, the next "lakes" should rather be named after the hot ones found atop of Mount Nyiragongo or Mount Erebus.
Realistically, we cannot expect Alder Lake to work any better than Rocket Lake as a hackintosh:
No iGPU (it's the same as Rocket Lake) is already a given.
Quirky Thunderbolt 4, if any.
Quirky overall (Z590 Vision D
build: DMAC, DMAR, GPTW, HPET, USBW+kext… what's with all these SSDTs? Gigabyte used to be the easy hackintoshing choice and the Z490 predecessors are Golden Builds… what happened?)
As for performance uplifts, I'm dubious. If Gracemont cores have to be disabled, then there will be no uplift in core count over Rocket Lake—two down over Comet Lake
—, only IPC improvements—and not even the excuse of AVX512 to reach those 241 W. If Gracemont can stay on (these cores, and the cache that is attached to them, were paid for after all…), multicore performance will increase, but, without an appropriate scheduler, aware that there are two types of cores and that Gracemont cores come in clusters of four which share their L2 cache, this performance will be irregular.
And let's not forget there's no certainty it will work at all!
But this thread will be very, very interesting to watch in the coming days—or weeks.
Update The
monthly message from Acidanthera comes with useful warnings. And I love the understated language (my emphasis).