Intel’s Alder Lake-S flagship, the Core i9-12900K is being sold in the Chinese grey market for roughly 6,900-7,500 Yuan, or $1,000 USD. This info was shared by @yuuki_ans on Twitter, a source known for providing accurate preliminary info on unreleased Intel consumer and data center CPUs. According to him, there should be plenty of price cuts in the coming months which means that the retail version of the 12900K should cost pretty much the same as AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X ($799).
It’s worth noting that both the Core i9-12900K and the Ryzen 9 5950X are sixteen-core CPUs, with the former featuring a hybrid core architecture. The 5950X packs sixteen Zen 3 cores running at a maximum single-core boost of 5 GHz. The Core i9-12900K, on the other hand, features eight Gracemont Cores and eight Golden Cove cores, with the former having a single-core boost of 3.9GHz and the latter managing an impressive 5.3GHz. Coupled with an IPC increase of around 20%, Alder Lake shouldn’t have much trouble crushing AMD’s Ryzen 5000 processors. AMD is already prepping a 3D stacked version of the Zen 3 CPUs with V-Cache aimed at providing a sharp increase in gaming performance. The question is, will it be enough to overcome Alder Lake’s gains?
