Sales of Intel’s Alder Lake-S processors have started

Intel is hoping for the success of the Alder Lake-S processors and that’s no coincidence as it has previously created the best gaming chips. Then rivals from AMD took the palm away from the chipmaker with the launch of the Ryzen 5000. Ordinary users got only pluses from the return of the main competitor – each manufacturer became active in promoting the actual new products, instead of changing the names of the former versions of the processors.

The new series of 12th generation desktop chips from Intel comes with a socket and an updated platform. The former LGA1200 socket was only installed on Rocket Lake-S and Comet Lake-S, after which it gave way to the more advanced LGA 1700.

The brand’s fans are offered chips with a new type of RAM DDRS and redesigned PCIe 5.0 interface. It supports significantly increased bus bandwidth. The only limitation is that there are currently no devices on the market capable of such speeds. By purchasing the Intel platform, the user is opting for the future for now.

Things are much better with RAM – DDR5 RAM can already be purchased to increase performance. However, there is a nuance here as well – Alder Lake-S chips can work with DDR4 RAM and motherboards for this RAM version are available for sale. The difference from the new variant can only be demonstrated by tests.

Innovative processor

The launch of Alder Lake-S is not a commonplace upgrade, but an innovative solution that takes the Rocket Lake-S chip to the next level. The processor is based on a hybrid architecture with highly efficient and energy-efficient processor cores. Their improved layout gave the ability to process up to 24 threads. By comparison, its smaller sibling Intel Core i5-12600K is capable of processing not more than 16 threads.

The main purpose of energy-efficient cores is to process background processes, while their performance counterparts perform resource-intensive tasks. An updated Thread Director scheduler is used to differentiate the workload level between cores. It only works correctly with Windows 11.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking confirmed performance increase of i9-12900K chip in comparison with Rocket Lake-S. Compared to AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, which similarly supports 24 threads, Intel’s senior processor turned out to be 13% faster. Superiority of new product is even more noticeable on i9-11900K chip – it is 24%. However, these figures vary in different benchmarks, which is explained by the presence of a new architecture, not always combined with software.

The i5-12600K chip could not demonstrate its advantage over AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (both have equal number of threads) – a kind of draw was achieved. But in single-core performance category Intel products showed superiority over AMD competitors. However, the latter’s processors have been on the market for a long time, and still retain some competitiveness.

As a result, we can say that updated hybrid architecture helped catch up with AMD not only in terms of performance, but also in number of cores, and this task turned out to be unattainable for i9-11900K.

In terms of long-term performance, AMD and Intel chips showed stable performance under continuous load on all cores. The senior processor became the leader, getting 3,987 points on average. Its junior counterpart i5-12600K had no problems overtaking its predecessor i5-11600K. It is the larger number of cores in the new generation of gaming chips that explains such result.