There are a lot of questions about what Intel's upcoming Alder Lake processors will be like. How will the little cores effect performance? How powerful will Intel's first real 10nm desktop architecture be? Can it do it all without needing a crazy amount of power?
We don't have the answers to all these questions yet, but we are starting to get hints about what it might be capable of. The latest leaked numbers come from a Geekbench test, which show the flagship 16 core, 24 thread Core i9-12900K manage a single core score of 1893, and a multi-core score of 17299. That gives the Intel chip a 12 percent advantage over AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950X in the single core test, and 3 percent in the multi-core test.
That's impressive for a number of reasons. Firstly, because it suggests that Intel's new high performance cores have raised the bar in IPC and maintained high clock speeds (it will reportedly maintain a 5.0GHz+ boost clock on individual cores when necessary), and that its efficiency cores are still capable in multithreaded workloads, as the 5950X has 16 full-power cores, versus just eight in the Intel CPU (the other eight cores are low-power).
However, the big caveat here is that those single threaded score from Intel's CPU achieved are only around 6% higher than the existing Rocket Lake processors from Intel -- which also beat AMD's top chips. In real world gaming, however, AMD's chips pull ahead still. Where Alder Lake makes up big ground, is on Rocket Lake's multi-threaded performance, where the 12900K is over 60% faster than its predecessor.
That could give AMD pause for thought.
Intel is swinging back with Alder Lake in a big way and it's going to be exciting to see what it can do, and what AMD counters with in turn.