Intel Alder Lake (12th Gen) Launch

On the 27th of October, Intel gave the exciting announcement that they would be releasing their 12th generation of Core Series CPUs. Although their past few generations have been ... less than amazing, these new CPUs hold real promise, and may provide AMD with some strong competition!

Overview

Not only do these new CPUs have competitive performance, they are also priced fairly competitively against AMD's offerings, especially at the lower end. Intel had been struggling to excite the community, with their 11th Gen CPUs actually being a downgrade from their 10th generation in some cases, but this is a sign that things are changing. Not only does this give consumers more options, but it encourages growth and innovation in the CPU market. If one company becomes dominant, as Intel did in the decade before Zen, technological advances are rare and insignificant, as the company has no real reason to spend money developing new technology, when no one else can compete with them anyway. This way, with AMD and Intel both fighting desperately for the performance and value crowns, there are many impressive technological advances, like Intel's new Hybrid-Core architecture, and AMD's V-Cache.

Specs

Now, the bit we've all been waiting for: let's take a look at the new CPUs!

The clock speeds generally look fairly similar to the last few generations (although the IPC is 19% higher!), but the core configurations are unlike anything we've ever seen before! Unlike other x64 CPUs, these new chips have both high performance P cores, and high efficiency E cores. For the first time, sub-£300 CPUs are equipped with 10 cores! 10! These CPUs look highly competitive, especially the Core i5-12600K, and 12600KF, priced at $289 and $264 respectively. This is cheaper than AMDs Ryzen 5 5600X, and both chips are higher performing in most games, as we'll see in a little bit! 

Technology

Alder Lake has tonnes of cool tech crammed into it, but here we'll take a look at some of he best parts. 

The main stand out feature is obvious the Hybrid-Core architecture, with high performance Golden Cove cores, and high efficiency Gracemont cores. This is part of the reason these new chip don't run anywhere near as hot as Intel's last two generations of chips, and this helps increase performance. The E cores can deal with low demand background tasks, whilst the P cores can do the intensive work necessary for things like gaming and code compiling. This really helps with performance, as most of the time it's almost as good as having more P cores, as in other CPUs some of the normal cores have to deal with the low intensity background tasks, and so their extra capabilities are almost wasted. This helps Intel to keep their chips cheap (E cores are cheaper to produce than P cores), whilst still increasing performance.

Benchmarks

These results show quite clearly that Intel have done very well for themselves, truly earning the title of the world's best gaming CPU, with their 12900K. Clearly their new architecture works! Although the Ryzen 5000 CPUs won out in some games, overall the new Intel chips reign superior against their respective competitors. The 12700K even beats the old Ryzen 9s!


Core i3s?

Whilst Intel haven't announced lower spec, cheaper skews yet, it is suspected that they will be released in the not too distant future, along with the unlocked i5, i7 and i9 skews.

Ryzen 6000?

Looking at Intel's newest family of CPUs, you may be wondering if AMD are releasing their next generation of Ryzen CPUs anytime soon. It is believed that AMDs Ryzen 6000 CPUs will be release in January of 2022, and there will be a lot riding on their shoulder's, to overcome Intel's new CPUs. AMD have made some bold claims about the performance improvements offered by their new 3D V-Cache, but only time will tell if this will be enough!

Conclusion

There is no doubt that this new release is exciting news for everyone in the CPU market. After the boredom of Intel's last two generations, something surprising and impressive was sorely needed. Luckily Intel delivered, and they delivered well, with the new CPUs being very high performance chips. This is good news for all consumers, whether they plan to purchase a 12th gen Intel chip now, or wait to see what AMD have to offer, as these good value chips are already lowering the price of 5000 Series Ryzen chips, and they will drive AMD to target very high performance targets with their next generation of CPUs.

As always, thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new, and I'll see you next time!

Thanks you so much Hardware Unboxed for the benchmark stats shown.