According to the latest info on Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake-S processors (via @Raichu), the next-gen Core i9-12900K processor will be an absolute powerhouse, beating AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X by as much as 26% in single-threaded workloads. It’s important to note that while this is a Qualification Sample, it was water-cooled so the retail samples are likely to score slightly lower.
In the Cinebench R20 benchmark, the Core i9-12900K (on air-cooling) reportedly nets an impressive 11,300 points, nearly a thousand more than the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X. This is despite the fact that the former features only eight full-fledged performance cores and eight efficiency cores with a boost of around 4GHz. This means that the Gracemont cores are more or less on par with Sunny Cove in terms of IPC.
The single-core score, on the other hand, is derived from the Golden Cove core which looks to be 26% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X at a boost clock of 5.3GHz, indicating an IPC boost of 20% at the very least (5950X runs at 4.9GHz). This means that Intel will be holding onto the single-core performance crown for at least a year until Zen 4 launches in 2023. No amount of cache or frequency boosts will change that. AMD might be able to snatch the multi-threaded and gaming crown with its Warhol/3D V-Cache refresh, but Alder Lake’s IPC will make things quite difficult for Team Red.
