Intel has finally released details on its highly anticipated 12th-generation Alder Lake processors, including pricing and performance specifications for three new chips.
The flagship $589 Core i9-12900K, billed as the "world's fastest gaming processor," leads the charge with 16 cores and 24 threads.
According to the company, this chip offers a 13% generational boost in gaming performance, outperforms AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X flagship by up to 30% in gaming, and performs twice as well in content creation workloads as its predecessor. In some game streaming settings, Intel claims an 84% generational jump in frame rate.
Intel also introduced its $409 Core i7-12700K and $289 Core i5-12600K chips at the Intel Innovation conference on Tuesday, which offer significant gen-on-gen performance and core count gains while maintaining the same pricing as their previous-gen siblings.
Alder Lake marks the most significant upgrade to Intel's chip architectures in the recent decade. Alder Lake's new hybrid x86 architecture employs Performance cores (P-cores) for high-priority lightly-threaded work (Golden Cove architecture) and Efficient cores (E-cores) for background and heavily-threaded workloads with the power- and area-optimized Gracemont.
The Alder Lake-S desktop CPUs also support the cutting-edge DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 standards, which provide a significant improvement in throughput and give Intel the lead in desktop PC connectivity.
Although it's been six years since Intel released its first 14nm processor, Alder Lake also heralds the start of the 'Intel 7' era for desktop PCs. Intel recently renamed its process nodes to fit industry nomenclature (technically, this is the second generation of Intel's 10nm process). We previously recognized this production innovation as 10nm Enhanced SuperFin, but Intel recently renamed its process nodes to reflect industry nomenclature.
Intel 7 makes its debut in Alder Lake processors, bringing improvements in density, power, and performance over the previous 14nm process.
The Alder Lake chips are currently available for preorder, but will not ship until Nov. 4, 2021. For the time being, Intel has provided us with a wealth of new info, including in-depth insights on pricing, performance, motherboards, memory, and new overclocking details.
Interestingly, Intel also revealed that Alder Lake may exhibit 'performance variability' in Windows 10. It has also decided to discontinue its TDP ratings and recommendations in favor of a new naming scheme and criteria.
