The Intel Core i9-12900K, the flagship of the Alder Lake family, has been tested again under Cinebench R23. For the moment, the leaks are multiplying but a lot of shadows remain: which OS (Windows 10 or 11), which maturity of the sample used, which memory DDr4 or DDR5… But if we ignore all that, the facts are there: leak after leak, the i9-12900K is regularly far ahead in single-core and rather well in multi-core too. The single-core performance of the next i9 potentially announces the return of Intel to the forefront of gaming.
Let’s go back to the latest figures: the sample tested under Cinebench R23 gets a score of 2007 points, a figure to be compared with the score of the Core i9-11900K which is around 1770 points and with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X which gets 1598 points. This means that the i9 Alder Lake has a 25%lead over its direct rival.
i9-12900K: far ahead in single-core, very close in multi-core
Regarding multi-core performance, the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X is still slightly ahead with 28 963 points against 27 461 for the i9 which, remember, has “only” 24 threads. In the next part of today’s leak, the author also used the integrated benchmark of CPU-Z. Here again the trend is confirmed since the 9-12900K is once again ahead with 827.7 points against 665.7 points for its direct rival (24.7% difference). In multi-core, we find the same findings since the i9 gets 11,456.5 points against 12,957.7 points for the Ryzen 9 5950X (13.1% difference).
The trend is confirmed with each new leak, but beyond the maturity of the sample or the choice of the ram, it is clearly the choice of the OS that poses a problem. As we now know, Windows 11 is clearly handicapping AMDs.