The site XFastest has obtained an engineering sample of the I3-12100 and tested it. This model shows us a glimpse of the low-end Alder Lake, which has not yet been released or officially announced.
Intel I3-12100, the future king of quad-core?
At the moment, only the high-end K models of the Alder Lake generation have been released. But the lower-end processors are released in a second time, when they are not forgotten as in the previous generation Rocket Lake. The Intel Core I3-12100 is a processor with 4 P(Performance) cores and 8 threads, with no E(Effient) core unlike its currently purchasable big brothers. The sample features a maximum boost frequency for a single core of 4.3 GHz. The last technical information is that the chip features a PBP (formerly TDP) of 60W and a MTP(Maximum Turbo Power) of 77W. The results were obtained with 16GB of DDR4-3600 on an ASRock Z690 Steel Legend and an RTX 3060 Ti. The AMD processors compared use the same GPU and RAM on an ASRock X470 Taichi.
We see solid performance against the Zen2-based Ryzen 3s, with up to 20% better performance than the 3300X on PCMark and 26% and 28% on Cinebench R23 single and multi.
We can also see that under AIDA64 the I3 is close to the 3100 in both TDP and temperature, while the 3300X is around +15W and °C. In this article, we share with you only a part of the benchmarks performed and invite you to look at the others directly on the XFastest article if you are more interested. We could expect a launch price close to the Ryzen 3300X, i.e. 130 €. Remember however that the two AMD CPUs used for the comparison here have little availability, especially at the announced price.
