Intel 12th-gen Core CPUs are official: Performance preview, Alder Lake models and specs

[Lew Zealand]

Intel is back at the top end but it has neglected the bread and butter. The 11th Gen did not have any i3s and it looks like the 12th Gen is heading the same way. So those budget users will be stuck on 10th Gen processors for the foreseeable future.

Yeah this has been somewhat annoying on both fronts as AMD's commitment to the lower end has been sparse as well. No 4c8t Zen+, scarce 4c8t Zen2, no 4c8t Zen3. Intel at least has decent and available 4c8t 10th Gen but previous 2 gens were 4c4t, no 11th gen 4c8t, and no leaks of 12th gen 4c8t.

So a single choice of decently available and priced 4c8t for the past 3+ years. Bleah.

 

[Irata]

Aside from the leaked benchmarks that are out that show 12600K/12700K crushing 5600X and 5800X, it is not hard to make an educated guess that Alder lake will be faster even without any single benchmark

Intel does not need big boost over 11900K to surpass 5800X in productivity..... We know 12700K has 8 big cores (And we can safely assume these are more powerful than 8 cores on 11900K)..... Now add 4 E cores which will boost multi-core score even more..... And we can easily conclude that 12700K will be faster..

Even if P cores has barely any performance boost over rocket lake, the 4 extra cores in 12700K alone should put it above 5800X.... 12700K will faster even if you go by the worst estimations

I don't care about intel or AMD slides, and you don't need slides to know which one faster. It is not hard to figure out that 12700K will be faster than 5800X overall in multi-threaded and productivity.....

That is a perfectly logical assumption. the question here is what will these platforms end up costing vs Zen 3 ?

Right now, the 11700KF is already priced above a 5800x in retail and depending on how much the cheapest boards that allow it to run at full power cost, pricing could get awfully close to a Ryzen 5900x + good B550 combo even if you chose DDR 4.

 

[rmcrys]

Intel is back at the top end but it has neglected the bread and butter. The 11th Gen did not have any i3s and it looks like the 12th Gen is heading the same way. So those budget users will be stuck on 10th Gen processors for the foreseeable future.

Budget lines make very low money, so they are no priority and will use older production lines;

AMD since Zen lineup forced Intel to speed up development from tech that was supposed to come a lot later (= tesla made other companies speedup electric revolution at least 10 years sooner).

I have no doubt that Intel 12th Gen and Xe graphics are what Intel reserved for much later and also has the help from the old buddy Microsoft. I won't buy Intel for the next years because:

1) I have principles and they scr.w years and years everyone with old tech, expensive and market manipulation techniques (monopolistic). Only because AMD made them speedup and may have now a good product, why would I buy from them?!

2) I am changing to Apple (already have an M1) because they are really revolutionary and those chips are truly something, also very low consumption. They showed Qualcomm, Samsung and Intel how things should be done. If anyone already used an M1 Mac will know what I mean.

3) if I have to buy a new PC (I have some 8th gen with Nvidia graphics) to game, I definitely will go AMD. AMD has spent effort and energy to fight back, they have excellent products (CPU...) and I definitely will help this company to be stronger and better. I already know what happens if Intel has the monopoly (crappie GPUs, heat, high prices, same tech year over year with small frequency updates).

Go Apple, go AMD!

 

[maroon1]

I'm so confused. We have 8 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores and the power consumption tops out at 240w?? Assuming it does lose to 5950/5900 in multithreading, this definitely is not a win.

It does not really lose to 5900X in multi-threading based on benchmarks that got leaked

It is much closer to 5950X than 5900X, and in single-thread it beats both


Anyway, we will get full review next week

 

[Lounds]

Ah intel marketing machine is in full swing I see. Bring on the competition. Prices should hopefully get more competitive from AMD. Price cut to Ryzen 5000 line up stock, and then Ryzen 6000 (Zen3D) bringing parity to Intel's current line up.

 

[Yenega]

AMD price drop incoming, however I'm not stupid enough to buy a 1st gen hybrid CPU.

1) Windows 11 and software needs to get patched and tweaked for hybrid design, before you see the true potential.

2) DDR5 are 50-75% more expensive than DDR4 and have bad timings and mediocre clockspeeds in the beginning - Give DDR5 a few years to mature and prices will come down too

3) Raptor Lake aka 13th Gen is going to be much better than Alder Lake (25% better IPC + Intel 4 proces), and by this time we will see Zen 4 on AM5 too. A true next gen comparison will be Raptor Lake vs Zen 4.

AMD will refresh 5000 series and add 3D cache as a stopgap solution till they can use TSMC 5nm proces for Zen 4.

There's no doubt that hybrid design is going to be the future, this is also Apple's M1 approach however using ARM instead of x86.
AMD will do hybrid design too, they said.

More and more cores is not the solution going forward, smarter coding is.

AMD does not really have a big node advantage anymore. Intel 7 is fairly close to TSMC 7nm/6nm and Intel 4 will be close to TSMC 5nm.

 

[veLa]

Dang, you mean the motherboard I had to get with my video card in the Newegg shuffle is basically now useless?

 

[Peter Farkas]

As soon as the ARM compiler will be available in Windows (not just as part of the insider program) we will have a 3-way competition going on in my opinion. That should make things really interesting.
Covid and supply chain issues will still mess up the market for us for a while, but I see a light at the end if the tunnel!

 

[tylerb1489]

RIP Ryzen 5000 lol. I’ve had my 4790K for 7 years and I genuinely thought my next CPU would be a Ryzen part with the way Intel were going. But by the looks of this I will almost certainly be getting a 12600K.

I look forward to all the AMD fans praising Intel for forcing AMD to lower their prices as they undoubtedly will after this launch.

I had my 4770k build for 8 years. It has been struggling in newer games ie. new world, so I went all in on a 12700k setup.

 

[Sausagemeat]

I had my 4770k build for 8 years. It has been struggling in newer games ie. new world, so I went all in on a 12700k setup.

Is new world worth it? It looks more pvp focussed to me and I’m not too into that.

Yeah I’m noticing my 4790k can drop below 60fps in a few games like Far Cry, cyberpunk. It’s def time to upgrade but il wait until can get a new GPU.

 

[Nintenboy01]

Is new world worth it? It looks more pvp focussed to me and I’m not too into that.

Yeah I’m noticing my 4790k can drop below 60fps in a few games like Far Cry, cyberpunk. It’s def time to upgrade but il wait until can get a new GPU.

Modern games seem to crave a lot of cache and RAM bandwidth now for the CPU, plus at least 6+ cores. Perhaps it's due to all the large textures and shaders that have to be shuttled around so hopefully DirectStorage helps alleviate some bottlenecks.

 

[Sausagemeat]

Modern games seem to crave a lot of cache and RAM bandwidth now for the CPU, plus at least 6+ cores. Perhaps it's due to all the large textures and shaders that have to be shuttled around so hopefully DirectStorage helps alleviate some bottlenecks.

I upgraded my RAM from DDR3 1600 to DDR3 2133 CL9 a couple of years ago and actually noticed a remarkable improvement in some modern games. This is why I want to ensure my next machine is DDR5. Memory bandwidth is usually overkill for most new CPUs but as they get older you find you wished you paid the extra for higher bandwidth memory.

 

[quadibloc]

Maybe mistakenly, I felt that the best feature of newer generations of Intel CPUs was AVX-512. It seemed to me that this had the chance of almost doubling the performance of Intel CPUs compared to AMD CPUs that were otherwise similar.
But the way the current chips are designed, one has to disable AVX-512 support, or disable the smaller energy-efficient cores.
I find this frustrating. If AVX-512 isn't all that helpful, of course, it may not matter. But it seems so unnecessary.
One way to avoid it would be for AVX-512 support in operating systems to include labelling executables that use it; if one is in use, it would have to be kept on the P cores and not switched to the E cores.
Also, since AVX-512 actually made its debut on Atom cores in the Xeon Phi, there's really no obstacle to the E cores having AVX-512 support, even if the performance isn't all that great.
This limitation seems just so unnecessary, and so terribly disappointing.
But at least it saves me money; I won't need to run out and build an Intel system in fear that my AMD box will become outdated.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Core i9-12900K at 6.8GHz looks like an absolute BEAST!

 

[Jack Deth]

I'll skip the fanboy hype and go straight to real benchmarks.

Not the ones leaking out from Intel's marketing department.

 

[Mithan]

As somebody who bought a 10850K in January, I think this looks nice, but definitely not worthy of an upgrade.

 

[Lew Zealand]

As someone who bought a 9700K about a month ago, I think this looks nice, but I will definitely need good GPUs to become way more affordable before I'll need a CPU upgrade because it's bottlenecking.

 

[dad0ts]

AMD price drop incoming, however I'm not stupid enough to buy a 1st gen hybrid CPU.
...

There's no doubt that hybrid design is going to be the future, this is also Apple's M1 approach however using ARM instead of x86.
AMD will do hybrid design too, they said.
....

That's true but... only for mobile cpu: everybody uses big.little there...As for the desktop I think even intel will not continue using this approach in the long term. Where AMD said they 'll do it? On desktop - no, maybe notebook/mobile? If intel has 6+0 core i5 (seems smb already seen the smaller die of such config) then it's the best option to buy: not pay for the crippled E-cores which force you to use win11 (or disable 'em). If 8+0 was possible, but no such option is expected.

 

[Sausagemeat]

People need to remember that the E cores don’t just save power. They improve the single core performance of the P cores too apparently. Because it stops the system using hyper threading on a P core and instead routes extra threads to an E core instead or something. There are also some tasks that perform better on E cores than on P cores apparently.

 

[Gastec]

i5-K(F) 150W
i7-K(F) 190W
i9-K(F) 241W
official Default
I will not be suprised if non-K SKUs will ignore Processor Base Power, too.
Looking forward to next year, when Intel will get beaten by AMD using only 2/3 of their power.

Exactly what we need now that our electricity bills have increased 240%

 

[Sausagemeat]

Exactly what we need now that our electricity bills have increased 240%

If you’re worried about power consumption more than performance then do not buy either AMD or Intel desktop CPUs, you should just buy a laptop. AMD desktop CPUs may use less power than Intel desktop CPUs. But both still use several times more power than laptops.

 

[Gastec]

If you’re worried about power consumption more than performance then do not buy either AMD or Intel desktop CPUs, you should just buy a laptop. AMD desktop CPUs may use less power than Intel desktop CPUs. But both still use several times more power than laptops.

Or even better, I should just drop dead and leave my place in this world for someone who is willing and able to pay more money.

 

[deathtrap]

In games and/or partly loaded CPU Intel was and is still nicely efficient.
Igor´s Lab did some nice tests regarding that topic.
In my opinion a higher TDP or Tau for the coming 65W will not be bad in any way. would be nice to have a 12600 non-K boosting some cores to 4.8GHz on a $75 Board