Thanks to the fact that some stores have already leaked the technical specifications of the Core i9-12900K, we can get a pretty global idea of what to expect from this Intel processor. This CPU is expected to have a total of 16 cores, Eight Golden cove high performance and another eight Gracemont energy efficient, all with a 125 watt TDP, a base frequency of 3.2 GHz and a maximum clock of up to 5.2 GHz, accompanied by 30 MB of L3 cache. We’ve seen this processor outperform AMD’s flagship on GeekBench before, but what about Ashes of the Singularity?
Intel 12900K vs AMD 5950X, 38% difference in performance?
The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X It also has 16 cores, but in this case they are all high-performance Zen 3s. This processor has SMT technology to deliver a total of 32 simultaneous processing threads operating at a base frequency of 3.4 GHz and a maximum speed of 4.9 GHz, all with 105W of TDP and 64 MB of L3 cache. On paper, AMD’s chip looks superior to Intel’s and should perform better than the 12900K, but the reality is quite different.
In the screenshot that we have placed above these paragraphs you can see the benchmarks obtained in the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark with a 12900K accompanied by an NVIDIA RTX 3080, although it is true that the specific characteristics of the GPU (if overclocked, etc.). It is also not known whether these results have been obtained using Windows 10 or Windows 11, and this is important because Windows 11 will be optimized for Alder Lake processors.
In any case, the Core i9-12900K with an RTX 3080 has scored about 14,000 points with the preset set to High at 1440p, while in these same terms a Ryzen 9 5950X scores 10,100 points, so Intel’s CPU performance it exceeds that obtained with the AMD CPU by no less than 38.6%. But now comes the trick: although both tests have been carried out with the same version of the benchmark (3.10.191346.0), on the one hand it is unlikely that the RTX 3080 used were the same and therefore the performance could vary, and on the other hand It seems that the AOTS configuration preset was not the same.
Same version, preset, and GPU. Note: this benchmark is really inconsistent, take with large brick of salt. https://t.co/66Vo9AlrJe pic.twitter.com/QcCb2ZJmyU
– Evan Stenger (@TheMalcore) September 21, 2021
For this reason, some users like the one we have linked just above these lines have rushed to search the database for a comparison that does use exactly the same preset in Ashes of the Singularity, obtaining very different results. Here the Core i9-12900K scores 12,800 points compared to the 10,100 points of the AMD processor, so here the performance difference is 26.73% and not more than 38.6%.
All in all, the performance difference between Intel’s 12900K and AMD’s 5950X is still more than remarkable, and we can actually rate it as crushing it as such a demanding benchmark for CPU power. It seems that Intel is finally doing things right, and this new generation of Alder Lake processors certainly promises a lot.
