Intel's upcoming 12th generation Alder Lake processors have been somewhat of a mystery for the past year. A (finally) proposed 10nm desktop architecture from Intel, using a combination of big and little cores, offering the sort of mobile configuration which seems so alien on a desktop PC. But it may be that all the questions and concerns we had about it may have been for naught, because some allegedly leaked benchmarks suggest Alder Lake may be about to butcher even AMD's best processors in a number of important ways.
The supposed benchmark results (via WCCFTech) show Intel's top-tier Core i9-12900K sporting eight performance cores and eight efficiency cores, with a total of 24 thread support. They can reportedly hit up to 5.3GHz when boosting, and this ultimately gives it a lead of almost 25% in the Geekbench single threaded benchmark over the Ryzen 5950X. It's faster than that same chip in several CPU encoding tests too (although it's much closer).
The same can be said for the Core i7 12700k and Core i5 12600K CPUs too, which give a similar tough fight to AMD's Ryzen 5800X and 5600X processors.
One intriguing result, however, shows the entire 12th generation falling behind both AMD Ryzen 5000 processors and Intel's own 11th generation CPUs in PCMark testing, which suggests this may not be as straightforward a general of CPUs as we've seen in the past. There also remains the question of power demand for this new generation, which many expect to be astronomical, and suspect could lead to problems of cooling and thermal throttling during sustained load.
What do you think of the new benchmarks?
