Intel has announced the arrival of the twelfth generation of its codenamed “Core” processors on the market Alder Lake, which will present a new design philosophy in core architecture and will see support for memories DDR5 ed a PCIe5.0
With Alder Lake, the Santa Clara company presents a new architecture that sees the CPU consisting of high-performance cores and high-efficiency cores, similar to what has already been done for some years in SoCs for smartphones and tablets. The first to arrive for the new generation will be the most performing desktop CPUs, those traditionally used in gaming PCs and for content creators, with 3 models available in two variants: “K”, as traditionally the acronym dedicated to overclockable CPUs, and “KF”, that is, overclockable – like the K – but without integrated GPU.
The top model of the new generation is the Core i9-12900K, with 8 core “performance” (with HyperThreading support) ed 8 core “efficiency”– offering a total of 24Thread-, and one maximum frequency of 5.2GHz on the most performing cores, using Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology, while the maximum frequency of the high-efficiency cores stops at 3.9GHz. It will support the new DDR5 4800MHz RAM memories, also remaining compatible with the DDR4 3200, and integrates an Intel UHD770 GPU; the i9-12900KF traces offers the same architecture excluding the integrated GPU.
With the i9-12900K Intel promises performance between 20 and 30% higher in gaming and between 30% and 40% in creative activities (such as video and photo editing, and 3D modeling) compared to the flagship of the previous generation, thus aiming to restore its leadership over AMD in the creative field and defend itself from the competitor’s attacks in the gaming field.
Completing Intel’s new offering i Core i7-12700K and KF, equipped with 8 high-performance and 4 high-efficiency cores (maximum frequency 5.0GHz thanks to Turbo Boost Max 3.0), and the Intel Cores i5-12600K/ KF equipped with 6 high performance and 4 high efficiency cores, the former with a maximum Turbo frequency of 4.9GHz.
Along with the new CPUs, that they use a new socket Compared to previous models (FCLGA1700), the new 600 series motherboard chipsets also arrive on the market, starting with the Z690 – dedicated precisely to processors overclockabili– offering support for Intel’s latest storage management technologies, such as USB 3.2 Gen2x2 (with transfer speeds up to 20Gb / s) and WiFi 6E.
Intel’s new processors, which they should arrive on the market with prices between € 300 and € 700, represent for the Santa Clara producer the first big step forward in years from a constructive point of view of chips for desktop, not only for the architecture of the cores, seeing theuse of the new “Intel7” lithographic – improvement of the 10nm process used on the previous generation for notebooks – compared to the 14 nanometer process used from the sixth generation onwards even if with small improvements from generation to generation, thus being able to aim for an improvement both in terms of performance and consumption and temperatures. Not of secondary importance, not only for the performance also from the purely image point of view for Intel, to bring to the debut the new DDR5 memories and and the most recent (and fast) PCIe5.0 bus, after the manufacturer of Santa Clara had come to support only in the previous generation – and lagging behind the competition – the PCIe 4.0 standard.
To see if Intel will actually be able to re-establish dominance in the PC CPU market, we will have to wait for the results of the first independent tests and benchmarks, if the American giant succeeds this time, however, it will have to avoid lulling itself too much on its laurels in recent years. competitors ready to undermine it have increased: not only the aforementioned revived AMD, but also Apple which with its most recent CPUs has reached very important numbers in the performance / energy expenditure ratio.