Yet another benchmark of the Intel Core i9-12900K has surfaced, comparing the Alder Lake-S flagship to the AMD Ryzen 5950X. The application used for the test is CPU-Z, so the validity (practicality) of the benchmark is debatable. Either way, the 12900K is roughly 30% faster than the Vermeer flagship in the single-threaded benchmark, and a smidge faster in the multi-threaded benchmark.
It’s worth noting that the high-performance Golden Cove cores are clocked at 5.2GHz while the low-power Gracemont cores are running at 3.7GHz. Overall, the CPU draws 330W of power. This is an overclocked chip, so the retail variants should sip slightly less power under load. However, the fact that just a mild overclock pushes the power draw to over 300W means that Alder Lake will be more or less as power-hungry as Rocket Lake and Comet Lake.
A few stock benchmarks of the Core i9-12900K ES indicate that while the single-threaded performance will be a fair bit higher than Zen 3, the multi-threaded metric is still led by the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X. In CPU-Z, the stock 12900K is approximately 25% faster than the Ryzen 5000 flagship in single-threaded, but falls behind in the multi-threaded benchmark.
In Cinebench R23, the Alder Lake-S flagship is once again up to 25% faster in the single-threaded test, but fails to beat the 5950X in the multi-threaded benchmark. This would make sense as the Zen 3 cores are quite a bit faster than the Gracemont cores, thereby canceling the IPC advantage of Golden Cove in multi-threaded workloads.
