Intel’s budget Alder Lake-S processors are due to launch in the first quarter of 2022. A lack of non-X Ryzen 5000 processors and aggressive pricing are set to make these chips some of the company’s most popular offerings in recent years. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen leaked benchmarks of the Core i5-12400, but till now, we haven’t heard much about the 12500 or the 12600.
Until now, that is. A Chinese source has leaked the screenshots of the CPUs along with the CPU-Z specs window. The Core i5s are Engineering Samples (ES) while the Core i9 appears to be from a retailer which is a bit surprising as we’re still at least two months away from the official launch.
All the non-K Core i5s are hex-core CPUs, lacking the efficiency cores and a TDP of 65W. The Core i5-12400, 12500, and 12600 are basically identical, with increasing boost speeds (in that order). Unlike previous generations, the non-K Core i5s differ from the Core i5-12600K not only in terms of the core clocks, but also with respect to the core counts (12600K has four efficiency cores in addition to 6 performance cores), and therefore the L3 cache. The two are, in fact, based on different dies:
The Core i9-12900 and Core i7-12700, on the other hand, use the same die as their K counterparts, and apart from the unlocked multiplier and a lower boost clock are technically the same CPUs.
