Intel Core i9-12900K

[lola46]

Is sad intel still losing in some Benchmark even after nearly two generation

 

[Dr. Dro]

What a shame, I was told for months that AMD would go bankrupt today and I had hoped to buy some of their worthless assets to flip as I fully intend to buy one of the 5 Zen 3D prototype units they found the coins to manufacture before sinking into eternal debt, but instead I get 3% less performance overall and 3% more in games, no bankruptcy in sight. Sad!

On a serious note, I'm impressed. Alder Lake is an excellent platform and a feat of engineering, this shows. The power consumption may still be on the wild side and some compromises were made like the removal of AVX-512 support, but I understand what Intel wants to do here - they're increasingly going to focus on the performance and efficiency of the small cores going forward, which should eventually rival and supplant the high-performance ones entirely, while retaining the major advantages of that design. This is the Intel we want, an Intel with enormous engineering prowess, competitive prices and high availability.

Eager to see AMD's response, which thankfully will be a drop-in upgrade for me. That way my brother gets my 5950X, I flip the 3900XT I gave him when I upgraded, and I get a modestly priced upgrade for everyone by paying roughly half of a single CPU's price. Even though the GPU market is sad beyond belief right now, it's awesome to see that at least in CPU land, things are going well.

Cheers

 

[Tom Sunday]

So to sum up, Intel's delivered the goods, but this model runs hot and is pricey. Seems to have taken back the performance crown. Imagine if they added in another set of core packs....

The power consumption and temps are concerning but you can't argue with that performance.

I think that once the dancing here is over the 'inconsequential' stuff like heat, pricing, platform upgrades, power consumption, etc. The Intel win for now will finally be real and surely settling-in with the many spectators here. Now let’s see Intel stock jumping (or not) in the weeks ahead. Because in the end it’s all about the money. Nothing else matters and reality as we all know bites.

 

[WhoDecidedThat]

In Igor Lab's review, (<- linked here) they measure CPU power consumption when gaming -

and measure watts consumed per fps.

Just putting it out there as an additional data point to consider.

 

[ARF]

What a shame, I was told for months that AMD would go bankrupt today and I had hoped to buy some of their worthless assets to flip as I fully intend to buy one of the 5 Zen 3D prototype units they found the coins to manufacture before sinking into eternal debt, but instead I get 3% less performance overall and 3% more in games, no bankruptcy in sight. Sad!

On a serious note, I'm impressed. Alder Lake is an excellent platform and a feat of engineering, this shows. The power consumption may still be on the wild side and some compromises were made like the removal of AVX-512 support, but I understand what Intel wants to do here - they're increasingly going to focus on the performance and efficiency of the small cores going forward, which should eventually rival and supplant the high-performance ones entirely, while retaining the major advantages of that design. This is the Intel we want, an Intel with enormous engineering prowess, competitive prices and high availability.

Eager to see AMD's response, which thankfully will be a drop-in upgrade for me. That way my brother gets my 5950X, I flip the 3900XT I gave him when I upgraded, and I get a modestly priced upgrade for everyone by paying roughly half of a single CPU's price. Even though the GPU market is sad beyond belief right now, it's awesome to see that at least in CPU land, things are going well.

Cheers

Alder Lake is a mediocre product in the best case, and a meh product in the worst case.

Intel has been sabotaging its own sales figures but this arrogant and stupid policy to always offer heavily castrated products compared to the top available Ryzen (for example the Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 cores and 32 threads).

12900K is only 8 cores 16 threads coupled with 8 small cores.
Should have been 16 full fat big performance cores and outsourced production to the TSMC proper 7nm process.

Intel is done.

The only thing that impresses is the fact that the performance delta between the Ryzen 9 5950X and 10900K and the slower 11900K was so gigantic, that now this miserable 12900K looks somewhat acceptable.


Well, it is not..

 

[dyonoctis]

I honestly think Intel should spend more time extracting more performance from those E-Cores. They're actually faster than Skylake cores while basically sipping power. Very impresseive

Reminds me of what happened when they realized that the Pentium m had a better potential than whatever they did with the pentium 4

 

[Dr. Dro]

Alder Lake is a mediocre product in the best case, and a meh product in the worst case.

Intel has been sabotaging its own sales figures but this arrogant and stupid policy to always offer heavily castrated products compared to the top available Ryzen (for example the Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 cores and 32 threads).

12900K is only 8 cores 16 threads coupled with 8 small cores.
Should have been 16 full fat big performance cores and outsourced production to the TSMC proper 7nm process.

Intel is done.

The only thing that impresses is the fact that the performance delta between the Ryzen 9 5950X and 10900K and the slower 11900K was so gigantic, that now this miserable 12900K looks somewhat acceptable.


Well, it is not..

That is one way of looking at things but as a 5950X owner myself, I disagree, like the original Ryzen (1800X), Alder Lake represents a new type of processor in its relative infancy. There are myriad improvements and some are quite significant (like the hardware thread scheduler), and well, like the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in a day.

For the reason I mentioned before - as well as preference for a more mature platform, I plan on grabbing the Zen 3D chip once it comes out. But that's dead end for the aging AM4 platform, while Z690 will live on to Raptor Lake, and will serve as the foundation for Intel's future processors as well. In fact, Zen 3D itself is a stepping stone, the increased cache sizes are the first foray into AMD's own next-gen CPU technology, and those chips will be but a taste of what Zen 4 onwards will offer us.

 

[W1zzard]

Using DDR5 6000 memory in your Alder Lake system versus DDR4 3600 skews the results in my opinion. Why didn't you use higher frequency DDR4?

3600 low latency is a fair sweet spot for Zen 3, Rocket Lake and Comet Lake imo.

What speed would you like me to use? Dual rank? Gear 2 on Rocket Lake? Possibly non 1:1 IF on Zen 3? WHEA errors on Zen 3?

or whatever the [memory] spec of the chip is

Anandtech does that iirc, but I feel for our enthusiast audience that it's reasonable to go beyond the very conservative memory spec and use something that's fairly priced and easily attainable

 

[Tom Sunday]

During the first quarter of 2021, Intel spent $3.62 billion on R&D, while AMD spent $610 million. There is a big message here with these numbers. Like I said many times…in the end its all about the money. The golden rule: "He who has the gold makes the rule."

 

[dyonoctis]

To me power consumption isn't usually a problem, but when you have a CPU that outputs as much heat as a mid range GPU it's starting to become kind of insane. Intel's E-cores would make sense in a laptop but now we know they're completely worthless because they still use a ton of power anyway.

Looking at the current state of things, it doesn't look like Intel can afford to go beyond 8p core...at least without severely lowering their frequency. Right now, their Big.little looks a bit like a shortcut taken to get better MT performance without making a 400w CPU that needs a dual 360 custom cooler just for itself. Which makes me really curious as to how Alder lake mobile will behave. It doesn't matter if they got the best score on geekbench when the M1 max biggest strength is sustained those performances even on battery

 

[RandallFlagg]

During the first quarter of 2021, Intel spent $3.62 billion on R&D, while AMD spent $610 million. There is a big message here with these numbers. Like I said many times…in the end its all about the money. The golden rule: "He who has the gold makes the rule."

Another false comparison. Tell us, what did TSMC spend on R&D in that same period. Now realize, AMD does not manufacture chips, Intel and TSMC do.

 

[ARF]

I honestly think Intel should spend more time extracting more performance from those E-Cores. They're actually faster than Skylake cores while basically sipping power. Very impresseive

Reminds me of what happened when they realized that the Pentium m had a better potential than whatever they did with the pentium 4

I see where you are going to.
Actually what you propose is that Intel should cut the P cores altogether and glue as many E cores as possible.
For example 32 E cores on a single die.

And see what happens in a 105-watt power budget

 

[Dr. Dro]

I see where you are going to.
Actually what you propose is that Intel should cut the P cores altogether and glue as many E cores as possible.
For example 32 E cores on a single die.

And see what happens in a 105-watt power budget

That is actually the ultimate objective, to bring the big cores' high performance into the high-efficiency cores, while retaining the advantages of that design. It's ingenious and very hard to pull off, but if anyone can do it, Intel can. A strong hint to this probably being true in the long run is that RPL will have twice the amount of little cores.

That way they increase performance, power consumption and more importantly, density all in one fell swoop.

 

[RandallFlagg]

Meh.. 12900K sold out, now selling for $1350 $1599 on Amazon.

 

[Manoa]

blanarahul I see what are you saying but you have to understand this is only one load out of many that you might need at any time, yes today you may be playing a games and do some internets but what if tomorrow you will need virtualization ? or x264 ? or you need to compile something ? to have a processor that can do all things well is more important than to have a processor that do only one thing well, besides when you do need to do those things on intel you will be paying back it all and don't forget that you can use affinity on the games and other processes so that they don't wake the other die on zen​

 

[HenrySomeone]

Alder Lake is a mediocre product in the best case, and a meh product in the worst case.

Intel has been sabotaging its own sales figures but this arrogant and stupid policy to always offer heavily castrated products compared to the top available Ryzen (for example the Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 cores and 32 threads).

12900K is only 8 cores 16 threads coupled with 8 small cores.
Should have been 16 full fat big performance cores and outsourced production to the TSMC proper 7nm process.

Intel is done.

The only thing that impresses is the fact that the performance delta between the Ryzen 9 5950X and 10900K and the slower 11900K was so gigantic, that now this miserable 12900K looks somewhat acceptable.


Well, it is not..

LMAO, the fanboyism, the delusions! Intel is done, hahaha! We'll see what drivel you'll be spilling forward two years from now when Meteor Lake hits while Ryzens will barely get to TSMC 5nm

 

[TheEndIsNear]

Wow. Everything except the power consumption. Yikes. I'll stick with my 10900k and 5600x. 4k you're limited by the video card anyway. The 10900k sucks enough power and puts off enough heat.

 

[Raendor]

Alder Lake is a mediocre product in the best case, and a meh product in the worst case.

Intel has been sabotaging its own sales figures but this arrogant and stupid policy to always offer heavily castrated products compared to the top available Ryzen (for example the Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 cores and 32 threads).

12900K is only 8 cores 16 threads coupled with 8 small cores.
Should have been 16 full fat big performance cores and outsourced production to the TSMC proper 7nm process.

Intel is done.

The only thing that impresses is the fact that the performance delta between the Ryzen 9 5950X and 10900K and the slower 11900K was so gigantic, that now this miserable 12900K looks somewhat acceptable.


Well, it is not..

Intel is done? How? Even though they’re not the undisputed kings, they still have competitive products and pricing for non-halo models. Unlike amd they never in the latest years reached something like bulldozer shit-tier level that was kept being pushed for years and years until only but the time of not zen, zen+ or zen 2, but zen 3 to actually get to decent performance. Amd came back, and it’s great to see after dozer disaster, but it’s only way upwards for intel from here too as platform will mature with faster ddr5 and improvements in following lakes.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

Meh.. 12900K sold out, now selling for $1350 $1599 on Amazon.

opening the 'New Offers' page, one price is $1097, which I think is a typo, while others are $1477 up to $1999

and let me say I'm looking for that leaked "its 50% faster over AMD" bit.

---

My take from this review, each camp is better at some things than the other, despite the ddr4 vs ddr5 argument.

 

[RandallFlagg]

opening the 'New Offers' page, one price is $1097, which I think is a typo, while others are $1477 up to $1999

and let me say I'm looking for that leaked "its 50% faster over AMD" bit.

It actually changed while I was typing that one-liner. Scalpers looking for the highest price the market will bear, I suspect.

 

[Denver]

According to Igor Lab's review (<- linked here) where they measure CPU power consumption when gaming -

and measure watts consumed per fps

Alder Lake is doing very very well.

Not really.

 

[HenrySomeone]

Ah yes, by far the most pro-AMD biased outlet out there (among the larger ones, that is not counting the full-on, out in the open fanboys like Moore's Law is Dead and the likes), they're certainly the ones to trust!

 

[NuCore]

Once eggs were fried on Fermi (GTX 480), now it will be boiling water for coffee or tea on 12900K (don't thank for the idea, just do such a test - who has this CPU of course).

 

[mb194dc]

12900k is basically overclocked out of the box. What I'm thinking is, if I get a 5950x clock it and and push it's power envelope to 300-400w~ with appropriate cooling to match it, what results am I going to then get in benchmarks?

 

[RandallFlagg]

Not really.
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