Intel unveils pricier Alder Lake CPUs, the ‘world’s best gaming processor’
Intel opened its recent Intel Innovation conference by unveiling what everyone has been waiting for: how fast its new 12th-gen ‘Alder Lake’ desktop Core chips will be, and how much they’ll cost. The flagship, the Core i9-12900K, will be the “world’s best gaming processor”, Intel executives said; it will be priced around £50 higher than the last-gen Core i9-11900K at launch, too.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there won’t be that much variety to Intel’s first ‘performance hybrid’ processors: just six new chips, which won’t even include a Core i3 processor. By contrast, Intel launched 19 new 11th-gen ‘Rocket Lake-S’ processors back in March, which will conceivably fill any gaps in Intel’s 12th-gen portfolio.
(At the Intel Innovation event, Gregory Bryant, executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group, said that there eventually be 60 new processors in the Alder Lake family. He added that Intel is currently shipping 28 versions of Alder Lake to PC makers.)
Alder Lake does have some unexpected twists. For one, Intel released data showing that Alder Lake can significantly outperform an earlier 11th-gen Rocket Lake chip when tasks are run concurrently, rather than one after the other. Alder Lake’s support for faster, pricier DDR5 has been known, but a new dynamic XMP memory overclocking feature adds an unforeseen twist. Intel
