In brief: Ever since several engineering samples of Intel's upcoming Core i9-12900K ended up on the Chinese market, there have been several alleged benchmarks popping up online to showcase the performance of the new CPU. The latest leak shows it easily defeating AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X in the Cinebench R23 multi-core test, which would be no small feat.

It seems like there's no shortage of leaks when it comes to Intel's upcoming Alder Lake flagship CPU. Last month, the Core i9-12900K was seen on Geekbench with single- and multi-core numbers rivaling those of AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X. Earlier this week, another Core i9-12900K sample was benchmarked in Ashes of the Singularity, with results that were 39 percent better than the AMD counterpart.

The latest leak comes via Twitter user @hw_reveal, who shared a screenshot of what appears to be an Intel Core i9-12900K that was able to score 30,549 points in the Cinebench R23 util-core test. This score would make the Alder Lake flagship faster than a standard, non-overclocked Ryzen 9 5950X, which can score around 28,000 points on the same test. Even Team Red's 32-core Threadripper 2990WX is only able to hit around 29,700 points.

One should note that an overclocked Ryzen 9 5950X paired with the best DDR4 RAM out there can easily score over 31,000 points in the Cinebench R23 multi-core test. Still, that doesn't make the alleged 12900K's result any less impressive, grain of salt included.

Interestingly, the test system appears to include the Gigabyte Z690 AORUS Ultra and 32 gigabytes of DDR5-5200 memory. The Alder Lake sample seems to be capable of running at up to 5.3 GHz, but it's unlikely it will boost that high in the multi-core test. It doesn't seem overclocked, but the DDR5 memory appears to be running above spec using Intel's new Gear 4 mode for better stability.

If the recently leaked retail pricing for Alder Lake holds and these results are any indication of the performance we can expect from Intel's 12th generation flagship CPU, Team Blue may well have a winner in its hands. That is until AMD brings the thunder again with its 3D V-Cache technology.