We’re just a few months away from Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake-S launch. Based on a hybrid core architecture with two new core designs in the form of Golden Cove and Gracemont, the company is looking to snatch the performance and efficiency crown from AMD. Cinebench R20 benchmarks (from yesterday) indicate excellent multi-threaded performance, beating even the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X in its own home turf:
Today, the entire specifications of the K series SKUs, Core i5-12600K, Core i7-12700K, and Core i9-12900K have surfaced, including the core counts, base/boost clocks as well as the PL1 and PL2 power limits. Let’s have a look:
| CPU | Core Count (P/E) | Golden 1-Core Boost | Golden All-Core Boost | Grace 1-Core Boost | Grace All-Core Boost | L3 Cache | PL1: PL2 Power |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core i9-12900K | 8GC+8GM | 5.3GHz | 5.0GHz | 3.9GHz | 3.7GHz | 30MB | 125W: 228W |
| Core i7-12700K | 8GC+4GM | 5.0GHz | 4.7GHz | 3.8GHz | 3.6GHz | 25MB | 125W: 228W |
| Core i5-12600K | 6GC+4GM | 4.9GHz | 4.5GHz | 3.6GHz | 3.4GHz | 20MB | 125W: 228W |
It appears that Intel has managed to push the boost clock of the 10nm performance cores to the same levels as the existing 14nm-class Comet and Rocket Lake-S parts. The efficiency (low-power) Gracemont cores are also running at roughly the same boost clocks as the Tiger Lake mobile SKUs. Furthermore, the L3 cache has also been significantly boosted to make up for any latency issues that may come with the relatively slower interconnect between the two clusters. The TDPs are more or less the same as the Rocket Lake-S parts, though it’ll be interesting to see whether it spikes as high with AVX512 enabled. At the time of launch, only the higher-end SKUs are likely to be rolled out with the budget variants gradually introduced the next year.
