Intel Unveils 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs

1/16/2022

Intel formally unveils its 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs for desktops with six processors. The lineup consists of the Core i9-12900K, Core i7-12700K, Core i5-12600K, and KF versions of the said processors. The KF versions do not have an integrated GPU, while the K models come with a UHD Graphics 770 integrated GPU.
All Alder Lake chips are manufactured using a 10nm process, but Intel this time goes for a hybrid design, where you have a combination of performance and efficiency cores. Similar to how Apple’s M-series processors work, the Performance cores do the bulk of the work that requires maximum performance, while Efficiency cores take care of background apps and other low-level tasks.

Because of the design, only the Performance cores have multi-threading. That means that 16-Core i9-12900K has a total of 24 threads since it has 8 Performance cores, while the 10-Core i5-12600K has a total of 16 threads since it has 6 Performance cores.
Intel also has a different way of advertising clock speeds: with the Core i9-12900K, you have a 3.2Ghz base clock, up to 5.1Ghz boost clock, and up to 5.2Ghz max clock for the Performance cores. The Efficiency cores, on the other hand, have a 2.4Ghz base clock and a 3.9Ghz boost clock.