Intel whipped the covers off its Alder Lake processors today at its Innovation 2021 event, finally sharing the official specifications, pricing, and g

Intel Shares Alder Lake Pricing, Specs and Gaming Performance: $589 for 16 Cores

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2021-10-28 02:30:03

Intel whipped the covers off its Alder Lake processors today at its Innovation 2021 event, finally sharing the official specifications, pricing, and gaming and application performance details for its high-end desktop PC processors that will soon vie for a spot on our list of Best CPUs for gaming. Intel's initial Alder Lake salvo starts with three chips and their graphics-less variants, with the flagship $589 Core i9-12900K, which Intel bills as the 'world's fastest gaming processor,' leading the charge with 16 cores and 24 threads. Intel claims this chip provides an average 13% generational jump in gaming performance, beats AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X flagship by up to 30% in gaming, and offers up to twice the performance of its predecessor in content creation workloads. Intel even claims up to an 84% generational gain in fps in some game streaming scenarios. Intel also announced its $409 Core i7-12700K and $289 Core i5-12600K chips that bring impressive gen-on-gen performance and core count improvements, but at the same pricing as their previous-gen counterparts. Alder Lake represents the most disruptive change to Intel's chip designs in the last decade. Alder Lake's new hybrid x86 architecture uses Performance cores (P-cores) for high-priority lightly-threaded work (Golden Cove architecture) and Efficient cores (E-cores) for background and heavily-threaded tasks with the power- and area-optimized Gracemont. The Alder Lake-S desktop chips also support the leading-edge DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 standards that offer a big increase in throughput, giving Intel the lead in desktop PC connectivity. It's been six long years since Intel launched its first 14nm processor, but Alder Lake also marks the beginning of the 'Intel 7' era for desktop PCs. We previously knew this manufacturing tech as 10nm Enhanced SuperFin, but Intel recently renamed its process nodes to match industry nomenclature (technically, this is the second generation of Intel's 10nm process). Intel 7 debuts in the Alder Lake processors and brings density, power, and performance enhancements over the ancient 14nm process. The Alder Lake chips are available for preorder today, but they won't ship until November 4, 2021. For now, Intel has given us lots of new information, including deep-dive details on pricing, performance, motherboards, memory, and new overclocking bells and whistles. We can also share pictures of the chips. Notably, Intel also disclosed that Alder Lake could suffer from 'performance variability' in Windows 10. It has also decided to part ways with its TDP ratings and recommendations, instead providing a new naming scheme and guidelines. We'll cover all of that here and on the following pages, but it's clear that Alder Lake reignites the AMD vs Intel battle in a very big way.  

Intel is only bringing its priciest parts to the retail market at first, but it is also shipping 28 more SKUs to OEMs for delivery in systems that will debut in early 2022. Intel hasn't shared the details of those models. We have deep-dive coverage of the Alder Lake SoC design and core microarchitectures here, along with a more broad overview in our Alder Lake all we know article. As a quick overview, Intel has dispatched with the 'TDP' (Thermal Design Point) nomenclature, and now assigns a Processor Base Power (PBP) metric in its place. The company also added a secondary Maximum Turbo Power (MTP) metric to its spec sheets to quantify the highest power level during boost activity (typically called PL2). We have more detail on the following pages. 

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