After months of rumors, Intel has finally announced its 12th Gen Alder Lake desktop processors.
The Alder Lake line features six processors that debut Intel’s new hybrid architecture, which mixes performance and efficiency x86 cores. Intel says the Performance (P-cores) are optimized for single and lightly-threaded performance while the Efficiency (E-cores) are optimized for highly-threaded workloads with the company’s Thread Director designed to keep track and analyze performance data in real-time and place the right application you have opened up on the proper core.
The Alder Lake desktop CPUs also introduce support for DDR5 RAM, PCIe Gen 5, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 6E on the new Z690 chipset. Unfortunately, these new processors won’t work with Z590 or older motherboards as the new chips use an LGA 1700 socket unlike the LGA 1200 socket found on the 11th gen (Rocket Lake) and 10th gen (Comet Lake) Intel Core processors.
Leading the 12th Gen line is the $589 Core i9-12900K, which features 16 cores (8 P-cores and 8 E-cores), 24 processor threads, and boosted clock speeds up to 5.2GHz. The flagship Alder Lake processor has more cores than the flagship Rocket Lake which had 8 cores and 16 threads, but slightly higher boost clock speeds (5.3GHz).
Other processors in the Alder Lake line include the $564 Core i9-12900KF, which includes the same processor cores and threads as the i9-12900K. The $409 i7-12700K, the $384 i7-12700KF, the $289 i5-12600K, and the $264 i5-12600KF. All the specs for each desktop CPU can be viewed in the image below.
Intel is touting its flagship Alder Lake processor as the best for gaming, with its own in-house benchmark testing. Intel demonstrated a test with the Core i9-12900K by testing several games, such as Age of Empires IV, Crysis: Remastered, and Hitman 3, and stacking them up to the last-gen Intel Core i9-11900K and AMD’s Ryzen 5950x CPU. The benchmark showed that Core i9-12900K had a higher FPS count in most games, but it also noted that the flagship Alder Lake and Rocket Lake CPUs were on par in FPS performance for Crysis: Remastered.
Nevertheless, these are Intel’s in-house benchmarks and should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s also important to note all these tests were running on Windows 11 Pro with a resolution of 1080p and not 4K.
The new 12th Gen Intel desktop processors are available starting November 4.
Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.