The new flagship Intel Core i9-12900K comes with 8 big cores and 8 smaller cores for less intensive tasks, which equates to a monstrous 24 threads.
Though the base clock speed comes in at 3.6 GHz, the single-core Turbo speed should hit 5.3GHz, which is the same as the previous generation Intel Core i9-11900K and the fastest of any CPU out of the box.
Despite the same peak speeds, Intel are claiming an IPC (Instructions Per Clock) uplift of 19% for Alder Lake compared to Rocket lake brought about through various architectural improvements, including larger L1, L2 (18MB vs 4MB), and L3 (30MB vs 16MB) cache sizes.
Known leaker Bilibili has released a screenshot of a test within CPU-Z, which shows the single-core performance of what he claims is the Intel Core i9-12900K compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.
If this leak is to be believed, it shows the single-thread performance of the CPU comparing very favorably to the current competition (as you can see in the above graph, courtesy of Valid-x86), and potentially also to AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 3D CPUs.
In single-thread performance, the Intel Core i9-12900K beats the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X by 27%! AMD says that its new Ryzen 3D series CPUs will be 5-10% better in performance than the current generation, which suggests that the Intel Alder Lake flagship will beat even them!
Alder Lake release date
The good folk at Videocardz have done some digging following an announcement by MSI about a free upgrade kit for Intel LGA1700 CPUs on November 4th.
It turns out that this is the date of the embargo for the Alder Lake-S, meaning that the Alder Lake release date for Intel 12th Gen CPUs is November 4, 2021.
This means that you will be able to get hold of the following F-series CPUs all on the same day, as well as the KF-series which doesn’t include integrated Xe graphics.
Intel i9-12900K release date – November 4, 2021
Intel i7-12700K release date – November 4, 2021
Intel i5-12600K release date – November 4, 2021
