Wednesday, October 27th 2021
Intel Announces 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" Desktop Processors
Intel today formally launched the 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" desktop processors. With it, Intel claims to have developed not just the best processors for gaming, but also close the overall performance gap with AMD, even against its top 16-core chips. "Alder Lake" is Intel's first Hybrid core architecture for the desktop, with 8 "performance" cores sitting next to 8 "efficient" ones in a configuration not unlike Arm big.LITTLE. The Intel Thread Director middleware gives the operating system awareness of the Hybrid core topology. Intel is only debuting the unlocked "K" and "KF" models spanning the Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5 brand extensions today, along with the top Z690 chipset. The rest of the lineup will join the product stack in 2022. Intel claims that its performance cores with near-30% IPC gains, and efficiency cores capable of Skylake-like IPCs, it is able to close the performance gap against AMD. The processors also herald a new socket, the LGA1700, along with next-gen platform I/O that includes DDR5 and PCI-Express 5.0.
We prepared a preview article with the limited amount of information we're allowed to publish today. Read it here.
Update Nov 4th: The reviews embargo has finally expired, we have the following Alder Lake reviews for you today: Core i9-12900K, Core i7-12700K, Core i5-12600K, ASUS ROG Maximum Z690 Hero, Intel Z690 Motherboard Comparison
We prepared a preview article with the limited amount of information we're allowed to publish today. Read it here.
Update Nov 4th: The reviews embargo has finally expired, we have the following Alder Lake reviews for you today: Core i9-12900K, Core i7-12700K, Core i5-12600K, ASUS ROG Maximum Z690 Hero, Intel Z690 Motherboard Comparison
29 Comments on Intel Announces 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" Desktop Processors
Intel was still being intel and showing gaming results without the windows 11 patch for Ryzen L3 cache issue.
It's mostly just good to see intel back with an exciting architecture.
And yes, Intel used the pre-L3 cache W11 patch for their first party benchmarks. Didn’t some here suggest this might happen?
Intel is not stupid either overall platform cost is likely to be decently higher assuming you want ddr5 and it would be sorta silly to buy a ddr4 board for alderlake because it locks you out of ddr5.
www.newegg.com/intel-core-i9-12900k-core-i9-12th-gen/p/N82E16819118339
Pure rumours/speculation though afaik, but I guess we'll find out soon enough.
Obviously Intel says more or less the same as a Comet Lake core.
So it might not be the same kind of Atom cores that we've come to know so far.
I'm sort of curious if the IMC struggles to populate 4 DIMM slots less for DDR4 over DDR5 potentially. I think it would depend how the IMC as a whole works and handles the two slightly different memory standards. If some of the design of the DDR5 IMC support also can help reliably run 4 DIMM's of DDR4 at once that's a good perk.
I have no idea if it's possible in practice though or even was a consideration at all in the design of the IMC. All I know is the IMC can handle more bandwidth of DDR5, but if some of it can be routed towards better stability of 4 DIMM DDR4 support that's a good trade off perk.
www.tomshardware.com/news/core-i9-12900k-smashes-multiple-world-records-at-68-ghz