Intel Might Be Working on Alder Lake Pentium and Celeron CPUs

Here’s a bit of news no one expected: Intel is rumored to working on a pair of entry-level Alder Lake Pentium and Celeron processors, both of which will have a sub-$100 price tag. This, in short, is quite a surprise, and it’s a wholly positive one, too!

It’s been two whole years since the last time Intel made Pentium and Celeron CPUs (10th Gen Comet Lake), and the fact that they’re going to once again focus on the absolute lowest segment of the market — while also having their most advanced architecture — is a twist no one saw coming.

The Pentium Gold G7400 and Celeron G6900 have both surfaced the web and, by the looks of it, they both belong to the Alder Lake family.

Intel Alder Lake | New Pentium and Celeron CPUs Inbound

Both processors are expected to have a dual-core design, with the Pentium Gold one having Hyper-Threading as well. They’re not going to blow anyone’s mind with their performance, but for regular, day-to-day tasks and web browsing, they’ll almost surely suffice. After all, that’s what most folks need.

Seeing how Intel’s Core i3 and certain Core i5 SKUs don’t support Alder Lake’s hybrid architecture, it stands to reason to expect that these Pentium and Celeron CPUs will only feature the Golden Cove Performance cores (or P-cores, in short). How big of an increase that’ll yield still remains to be seen, but it’ll surely be noticeable and worthy of upgrading.

They’ll also pack increased L3 cache as well which is quite a nice surprise (6MB for the Pentium and 4MB for the Celeron). Intel’s non-K Core i3 and i5 processors are scheduled for a grand reveal around CES 2022, which means these Pentium and Celeron models will surely follow right afterwards.

In any case, Intel’s willingness to compete in this more affordable segment of the market is great news for everyone involved as it’ll benefit us (the consumers) the most.