Intel's been the industry's favorite punching bag for the last few years
we've certainly taken our fair share of cheap shots but that changes today
because chips like this with two different kinds of cores in them or more
are probably the direction the entire industry is going to go that's right
Intel jumped on the bandwagon with ARM and apple for their best generational
upgrade in at least a decade but let's back up a sec
this isn't going to be another furnace like past generations is it and if
they're cheaping out juicing up their spec sheets with these
low performance efficiency cores how could they possibly compare to AMD
who ships only high performance cores our sponsor Corsair doesn't know thanks
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12th gen core codename alder lake is a paradigm shift for desktop processors
but it's also one that we've had in mobile for quite some time and the tl dr
is this instead of stuffing as many full power
cores into the CPU as possible then turboing them down when they're all
active the cores are now split up between performance and efficiency cores
called p and e-course respectively the
launch lineup ranges from 10 to 16 total
cores with the main differences between them being of course clock speed and
that the performance cores are capable of running two threads at once via hyper
threading there's more to the platform than that but the first question you
guys have is how does all of this impact performance great question but we need
to talk about Windows 11 first it's kind
of a prerequisite for testing elder lake's radical new design because the
thing is Windows 10 just doesn't have a scheduler that's capable of taking full
advantage of this new architecture this is a huge problem because up until now
Windows 11's new scheduler hasn't been kind to AMD
thankfully the fixes for performance issues on ryzen came out just as we were
starting our benchmarks so our numbers should be fair to both sides in spite of
the fact that we're benchmarking on Windows 11. we do need to address
another big variable here though alder lake supports both ddr4 and ddr5 which
each have their own trade-offs we chose ddr5 for our launch review meaning that
our numbers are going to represent a best-case scenario for performance
but maybe won't represent a best-case scenario for value due to ddr5's higher
cost f1 2021 starts things off with a bang for Intel with the core i9 12900k
coming in at 5 to 10 faster than its ryzen nine competitors and the core i5
just a hair's breadth away can Intel keep it up with forza oh yeah they can
that is anywhere from eight to eleven percent faster depending on the
parameter you're looking at and whatever advantage Intel has here probably clock
speed it's paying off in far cry 6 too with an even bigger lead it is up to 25
faster than the competition and never dipped below 100 frames per second and
if you've been paying close attention to the graphs the core i5 has never been
far behind making life really difficult for our previous value gaming darling
the ryzen 5 5600x moving on to microsoft flight simulator
well this is a bit of a mess isn't it the ryzen 9 5900x beats out the core i9
with the higher turboing not to mention higher core count 5950x
falling behind even the ryzen 5. given how lightly threaded flight simulator
has been so far this might just be an example of the new Windows 11 scheduler
running up against something that it didn't expect in spite of the fixes in
fact we almost threw this test out due to the weirdness but we felt like
whatever's going on this is one scenario where Intel's new silicon isn't as
dominant as they'd like it to be and is possibly also an area of investigation
for AMD and microsoft then you've got situations like cs csgo where Intel
treats us to even more ludicrous frame rates in the dust 2 benchmark and
civilization 6 where our turn times are a good 7 to 10 percent shorter than on
team red which could make that one more
turn before bed go by a little quicker overall our testing has firmly
demonstrated that Intel has reclaimed its crown for gaming performance with
the core i9 enjoying a solid 7 overall lead over ryzen 9 and the core i5
pulling ahead even further compared to the ryzen 5. man
this kind of competition is what i signed up for when ryzen first launched
now Intel famously thinks that cinebench is not really a real world test but
they've got cost to celebrate these numbers for a change cinebench tends to
scale linearly with core count so the fact that a CPU that has only eight
proper performance cores could dethrone the ryzen 9 is an achievement perhaps
fueled in part by its ddr5 memory it also demonstrates that those
efficiency cores ain't your grandma's efficiency course they clearly pack some
punch while the firefox compile did take a little longer on the core i9 versus the
5950x Intel still won out in the bursty
bmw blender render although they lost ground on the higher endurance
gooseberry test showing that for really serious multi-core work AMD is still the
more compelling option and aside though here that core i5 be
looking more like a 5800x than a 5600x
keep that in mind for when we discuss pricing later
now strangely corona benchmark seems to come back in favor of AMD's additional
course which shows that 3d rendering may be becoming more than simply a raw how
many cores do you have game puget bench for its part benefits from
what Intel's got on tap with a healthy lead especially in photoshop over AMD
although Intel falls short in spec workstation where the only consistent
wins are against the 5900x check out the
financial services and energy tests guys where the 5950x still lives in a league
of its own if you look at all the productivity benchmarks together though you'll see that the core i9 averages
about three percent lower than the more expensive 5950x and 10 higher than the
less expensive 5900x which puts it in kind of weird
might be worth it might not be worth it territory depending on what you're doing
the core i5 on the other hand is over 30
faster than AMD's competing ryzen 5 for just 10 dollars more at retail making it
very compelling that is at least if you were already down to spend the extra to
move to ddr5 we're going to have a follow-up comparing ddr4 to ddr5
performance at various clock speeds coming so make sure that you're
subscribed for that how is Intel doing all this though well first is the Intel
7 manufacturing process it's basically just a rebrand of their 10 nanometer
process that we've already seen in laptops but this is its first appearance
without thin and light power constraints and boy did they ever unconstrain it
because another big part of the equation is Intel effectively making support for
multi-core enhancement official what this does is throw the processor
base power rating completely out the window in favor of always running at
maximum turbo power letting the CPU be
unrestrained as long as there's thermal and power budget available it makes such
a dramatic difference to performance that motherboard manufacturers who
enabled this by default in the past were accused of cheating at benchmarks
of course like any overclocking it comes at a cost
the processor base power for the core i9 12900k is 125 watts same as the rest of
the lineup however when loaded down with a long blender render this thing easily
sucked back over 230 watts that is nearly double what our
ryzen 9 chips drew thankfully however this doesn't carry over to gaming where
f1 2021 stayed within the processor base power of 125 watts often remaining lower
than ryzen so as it turns out those
efficiency cores can make a big difference to lighter workloads as for
the core i5 12600k it stayed within the
125 watt processor base power on both the blender workload and our f1 2021
gaming test where it's only a little bit more power hungry than the ryzen 5 5600
x continues to get even more compelling doesn't it something to note though is
that you won't see anything close to this boost forever behavior on a non-k
chip so don't assume that just because you see two cpus with a similar model
number that you will see similar performance especially not at the very
high end to keep thermals under control under these circumstances Intel thinned
out their die even further and even thinned out the soldered thermal
interface material but in spite of their efforts the fact is that anything
drawing that much power that is that small is going to get hot
our nhd15 strained to keep our CPU package below 90 degrees and after about
8 minutes all pretenses that thermals might be manageable were completely gone
for context guys the nhd15 is the top
performing heatsink on the market and it beats out many water coolers at least
the efficiency cores only got to around 70 or 80 degrees so that's a plus i
guess but compared to even the ryzen 9 59 50 x a 16 performance core CPU
this thing packs a ridiculous amount of heat into a tiny area as much or more
than last gen rocket lake with multi-core enhancement enabled again
though it's far more manageable with gaming where f1 2021 pushed our core i9
into only the mid 60s our core i5 for its part never got hotter than around 70
degrees even in our all-out blender render while only hitting 60 in games
it almost feels like Intel sent us the core i5 because
that's the CPU that they really wanted us to review but they knew we'd want to
look at the core i9 so they threw that in the box as well like how much extra
heat is that for what six more FPS from a gaming perspective save your money buy
a water bottle at lttstore.com and it gets even worse for the core i9
these results mean that if you intend to run the CPU at the red line a lot maybe
you're a content creator who does a lot of rendering or you're a developer who
runs a lot of large compile operations you're going to want to invest in a big
cooler both for your CPU and for your computer room during the summer months
and that's a cost that you do have to consider another cost to consider is the
platform we already mentioned that ddr5 won't come cheap but the same is true of
the z690 chipset motherboards that 12th gen cpus require
now there will be long-term benefits to taking the plunge pci express gen 5
which doubles bandwidth over PCIe gen 4 is going to unlock the full capabilities
of the next generation z of graphics cards and the new dmi 4.0 link between
the CPU and the chipset means more high speed networking more high speed
peripherals more storage devices you guys can get the full details on this in
our platform overview which we're going to have linked below what you need to
know now though is should you pull the trigger if an op cooler is in your
budget the core i9 12900k would get the nod from us for both
gamers and for power users that is assuming that gaming was your top
priority but the really interesting chip today is the core i5 12600k
at 320 bucks it might be only a 6 core
CPU like a ryzen 5 but those extra 4
efficiency cores boy do they ever pick up a lot more
slack than we assumed they would i mean this is a legit generational leap over
even the 5600x and in my opinion it is
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with code Linus tech tips at the link down below if you guys enjoyed this
video go check out our full overview of the platform because there's a lot more
juicy details in there that just didn't make the cut for our performance review