- Kyle Chua
Intel Announces 12th-Gen Alder Lake Desktop CPUs, Shares Specs of New GPUs
Intel on Wednesday, 27 October hosted its inaugural InnovatiON developer conference, where it unveiled and shared details about its latest silicon offerings.
Chief among the announcements is the arrival of the chipmaker’s 12th-gen desktop processors based on the Alder Lake hybrid x86 architecture. The new generation will launch with six new chips, led by the Core i9-12900K model. This model has a total of 16 cores – eight Performance-cores (P-cores) and eight Efficient-cores (E-cores) – and 24 threads, reaching clock speeds of up to 5.2GHz using Intel’s proprietary Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology. The company hails it as the “world’s best gaming processor”.
Releasing alongside it is the Core i7-12700K model, which has 12 cores (eight P-cores and 4 E-cores) and 20 threads, and the Core i5-12700K model, which has 10 cores (six P-cores and four E-cores) and 16 threads. The remaining three chips are KF variants of these models that don’t include the integrated Intel UHD Graphics 770.
All of the new models benefit from an upgraded cache size. The i9 models get a 30MB L3 cache, the i7 models get 25MB while the i5 models get 20MB. They also offer up to 20 PCIe lanes, with 16 PCIe 5.0 and four PCIe 4.0 lanes.
Additionally, they’re the first processors to support DDR5 memory at up to 4800MT/s. DDR4 memory is also supported.
The 12th-gen CPUs, for now, only work with Intel’s new chipset, the Z690, which uses an LGA1700 socket. The company added that it's already working with various vendors to make over 60 new motherboard models built on this new chipset available at launch.
Intel will also now provide direct power ratings for base power and maximum turbo power for its new chips rather than giving them TDP ratings. The higher-end Core i9-12900K has a power rating of 125W at base clocks and 241W at maximum turbo clocks.
Intel added that, when it comes to benchmark mode performance, the Alder Lake CPUs bested the AMD Ryzen 5950X in the 31 game titles tested. The company also said the new chips tout improved performance in productivity tasks over its predecessors. Photo-editing, for example, is up to 36% faster while video-editing is up to 32% faster.
The new processors start at US$264 (about S$355.83) for the Core i5-12600KF. Meanwhile, the headlining Core i9-12900K is priced at US$589 (roughly S$793.88). Pre-orders are now available, with a release date of 4 November. Also coming out on the same day are the new Z690 motherboards.
During the event, Intel also confirmed that the Arc Alchemist GPU features 32 Xe Cores and each core has 16 Vector Engines and 16 Matrix Engines, boasting 512 Execution Units in total. Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs are slated to launch in the first quarter of next year.
Written by Kyle Chua