While no official release date has been announced, leaks suggest that Alder Lake S will arrive in November. However, on its website SiSoftware has just published a preview of the upcoming i9-12900K…
What is the i9-12900K worth on SiSoftware tests?
Once again, SiSoftware’s website publishes a preview of an unannounced processor, as it did with Rocket Lake (before deleting their review).
We are in the presence of the i9-12900K, with 8 P cores (Golden Cove) at 3.6 GHz base and 5.3 GHz boost, supported by 8 E cores (Gracemont) at 3.9 GHz boost. The whole thing embeds 30 MB of L3 cache and is contained in a TDP of 125W and a PL2 of 228W. The tests are done under Windows 10, with SiSoftware software updated for the Alder Lake architecture.
The site gives us a small disclaimer
to explain that the article is independent and is not sponsored by any entity like Intel for example. It is also important to take into account that the tests performed represent more the raw performance of the processor in specific tasks than a global evaluation.
As we can see in the different benchmarks proposed by the site (of which we put 2 examples here) the i9-12900K despite the absence of AVX512 manages to match the i9-11900K in the test “Vector SIMD Native“, but falls against the R9-5900X.
In the “Cryptography Native” test, the i9-12900K fails to match its predecessor largely because of the E cores, taking up non-negligible bandwidth that could be allocated to the P cores, as the site indicates.
In the end, on the benchmark suite used to test the i9-12900K, the processor did not stand out from the pack, performing similarly to the i9-11900K and below the R9-5900X.
But it should be remembered that this is still a preview and performance can be optimized upon release. Also, all this represents only the “raw” performance of the processor and not the performance in games or applications. But this insight is interesting to qualify the “hype” that we have seen rising on this processor for several weeks. Finally, as the philosopher says, this test (and the others) allows us to see that in reality… We don’t know anything very precise 🙂
