We’re expecting Intel’s Alder Lake platform to arrive later this year, on a new 10nm process and a big.LITTLE design which could offer a serious performance uplift. We might now have insight into just how big of a jump to expect, as Twitter user 9550Pro spotted new claims about the 12th generation CPUs circulating on the NGA.cn forums, and it’s the i9 12900K that has us particularly interested.
A new qualification sample of the upcoming flagship reportedly has a base clock speed of 3.9GHz, with a high single core boost of 5.3GHz. This boost speed is identical to the previous i9 11900K, but clock speeds are likely to change between CPU samples and the finished product. However, this chip could double the cores of its predecessor with eight high-performance and eight high-efficiency cores, a higher clock speed might not be necessary.
The forum post also lists purported Cinebench R20 scores for several Alder Lake chips. While an earlier engineering sample of the 12900K with unspecified lower clock speeds put in a score of 9,300, the poster claims that with the higher clocks on the new sample, it could score around 11,300.
That would be a higher score than the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X’s 10,428, while almost doubling the i9 11900K’s 6,214. We’d advise caution with these claims, however, as nothing is set in stone by Intel itself yet and things can change during production even if these are official samples.
However, if the performance results of Apple’s big.LITTLE-designed, low-power M1 chip is anything to go by, the 12900K could certainly wipe the floor against competitors when official benchmarks come to fruition.