Intel, previously a pioneer in terms of CPUs and the only answer for many players out there, is not having an easy time of it at the moment: AMD has positioned itself well in the market with its current Ryzen family and can compete with Intel’s counterparts not only in terms of games, but especially with a view to the multi-core performance even clearly outperform.
AMD is also on the advance in areas such as servers and mobile processors and has been able to do its job Significantly increase sales in the last few quarters. Can Intel put AMD’s CPUs back in their place with the upcoming twelfth generation of Core-i and attack them head-on? The first data on the Core i9-12900K provide an insight here.
High speed & more cores
The basic clock is Videocardz referring to a source that has since been taken offline 3.9 GHz and in boost mode at 5.3 GHz. These data speak for themselves and do not even represent the most interesting information about the leak. Because the structure that Intel chooses here is a little different.
For the first time, desktop x86 CPUs are based on a hybrid architecture in the 10 nm process with 16 cores. This means that eight large cores are there for applications that require a lot of performance, and eight small cores for programs that require less performance. The approach is not completely new, but borrowed from the ARM processors known from smartphones and the big.LITTLE principle.
AMD is also supposed to plan to introduce this principle in its own CPUs. Find out more in the following article:
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Windows 11 for full functionality
In order to be able to use the advantages of this hybrid technology, Windows 11 is also required. However, some samples should still have problems with the new operating system, as can be seen in the following picture:
Intel’s Alder Lake generation will also support DDR5, as well as the associated motherboards, PCI Express in the fifth generation (the current and still very fresh standard is PCIe 4.0).
The following table gives you an outlook on Intel’s roadmap for desktop processors:
|
Rocket Lake-S |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Alder Lake-S* |
Core number (max.): 16 (8+8) |
||||
|
Raptor Lake-S* |
Core number (max.): 24 (8+16) |
Clock rate (max.): unknown |
* Information not confirmed.
Is Alder Lake Worth It For Gamers?
In terms of games, Alder Lake-S is likely to improve compared to Rocket Lake-S (Core i 11000). Even if the clock rate of the eight large cores should actually remain unchanged, an increase in performance per clock cycle (IPC, Instructions per Cycle) is to be expected due to the architecture and process.
However, this is only really interesting for gaming in lower resolution levels such as Full HD. From WQHD, but at the latest under 4K, the graphics card is usually the limiting factor. The performance of the CPU then takes a back seat, which is also shown by our follow-up test of the Ryzen 5 1600 compared to the current top CPUs from 2021.
New standards such as DDR5 RAM or PCI Express version 5.0 are particularly exciting. The latter could prove to be an advantage with regard to storage technologies such as the DirectStorage API introduced with Windows 11. You can find out what is behind this in the following article:
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RTX 3000: RTX IO uses DirectStorage – what’s behind it?
Here, however, you have to wait for the first official tests and generally enjoy the information in the article with caution, as it is unconfirmed information.
When is the next CPU update due for you? Can Intel consolidate its market position again with Alder Lake? What is your opinion about this?
