Corei5-12600K& Corei9-12900K
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All prices include VAT and are from scan.co.uk. They are correct at time of going to press. All prices of Ryzen chips mentioned in the article also come from scan.co.uk.
SCORE
PRICE Corei5-12600K, £242 (£290 inc VAT); Core i9-12900K, £492 (£590 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
Intel had some catching up to do with Alder Lake, the codename for its 12th generation Core processors. For the past five years, AMD’s Ryzen family has battered it for core counts, value for money and all-round performance when it comes to desktop processors. Meanwhile, Apple has upended the whole power versus performance debate with its ARM-based M1 architecture. Intel needed to produce something special.
Fortunately, it has succeeded. With 16 cores and 24 threads on the Core i9-12900K, Intel has finally achieved a comparable core count to AMD’s halo Ryzen chips, which have held the core-count lead since the first 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 landed in 2019. It even beats the pricier Ryzen 5950X in threaded apps such as Cinebench, which had become AMD’s uncontested stomping ground.
Hybrid by design
This leap has been enabled by Intel’s biggest architectural shift in a decade: its hybrid x86 design. Alder Lake combines big and fast Performance cores (P-cores) with small and powerful Efficiency cores (E-cores) that chew through background processes with surprising speed.
The “Golden Cove” architecture powers the “big” P-cores, while the “little” E-cores come with the Gracemont architecture. Both provide much-needed instructions per cycle (IPC) improvements to Intel’s core designs, but note that only P-cores support Hyper-Threading.
We’ll start with Golden Cove, which adds a number of enhancements. There are now six decoders to process instructions rather than the four in previous Intel architectures (and Ryzen chips). In addition, “Fetch” can now handle 32 bytes of code per cycle rather than 16. Other tweaks all add up to the most powerful
