There is no doubt that the Alder Lake-S architecture is Intel’s most important in many years due to the enormous amount of new technologies that they are going to implement, but at the end of the day what matters to us hardware fans is knowing what power will have and therefore how fast our applications of daily use and favorite games are going to run.
It is continually said that Pat Gelsinger’s Gen 12 is going to compete against AMD’s Ryzen 5000, but its main rival in market share is the previous generation of own-brand processors, which it has to handily outperform. to set itself apart from other recent company designs and show potential buyers that it is worth the leap, even for those who have purchased a CPU with Rocket Lake-S architecture.
All Gen 12 outperforms Gen 11, including i7-12600K, in Cinebench
The fact that one of the more modest CPUs of the next generation of Intel processors outperforms the most powerful of the previous one is something that should be surprising at the first change and make us raise an eyebrow. However such a statement is not free and as you can see in the graph above, even the i5-12600K gives better performance results than the i9-11900K.
The results correspond to the single-thread tests under Cinebench R20 that have been carried out on Intel Gen 12 CPUs that have been published by CPU Monkey. In them we can see how both models i9-12900 give a result of 812 points in the single thread test, the 12700K and the 12700KF they reach the 768 points and to finish both the i5-12600K and the i5-12600KF get a result of 750 points. We must not forget that the difference between the K and KF models is whether or not the integrated GPU is active, so other than that they are identical chips.
Where we are surprised by the benchmark results is the fact that the Alder Lake-S i5 outperforms not only the i9-11900K and its KF variant with 645 points, but also to the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X based on Zen 3 and its 647 points. Which says a lot about the leap in power that is Intel’s new high-performance core of the next generation of processors. In particular, this indicates the enormous jump in IPC that the new Golden Cove cores have made with respect to Cypress Cove and we must bear in mind that the results obtained are of single core and the extra multicore performance that the E-Cores will also give you is not taken into account.
Although we have no doubts about the performance of the Intel Core Gen 12, what we do have some doubts is about the way in which the benchmarks can measure the performance of a CPU composed of heterogeneous cores. Seeing the results we have to conclude that the benchmarks would already be prepared to calibrate the power well. In any case, there is little left for the launch of these CPUs and seeing their excellent performance what worries us the most is their price, especially with the 11000 series still fresh in stores and with stock available.
In any case, the i7-12600K has shown its potential in Cinebench, showing that the performance jump is large and that the current i9s would not be up to the task. Can you also play with them?