Intel Alder Lake i9-12900K Flagship Spotted Running at Over 5 GHz

Intel's Alder Lake chips are shaping up to be absolute beasts, and it looks like AMD Ryzen will finally have excellent competition in four years.

This time, the flagship Core i9-12900K has been spotted running at over 5 GHz boost clocks, reports WCCFTech. The Intel Alder Lake chip's sky-high boost clock was spotted within the SiSoftware SANDRA database by Twitter user @TUM_APISAK:

The exact boost speed that the Intel chip was spotted running at is 5.08 GHz, which is actually close to its out-of-the-box all-core frequency.

Yes, you read that right: the top-of-the-line Alder Lake CPU will have an all-core boost clock that hasn't been seen since the days of the PC-melting FX 9590 from AMD.

Aside from the 5 GHz boost, a different clock speed of 3.6 GHz was also seen, which could be the Intel chip's average boost clock for its energy-efficient "little" cores.

This means that the 5 GHz number only affects its high-powered "big" cores.

The little and big cores are part of what Intel is doing differently this time around. Taking cues from mobile-based Arm architecture, Alder Lake CPUs feature a host of powerful "big" cores for handling the most intensive tasks, and an equal number of "little" cores to take care of background apps without consuming too much power.

In this case, the Core i9-12900K will have a total of 16 cores and 24 threads (8 big cores with hyperthreading, and 8 little cores without HT).

This makes the chip a hybrid CPU, which could be why it's showing immense promise against direct competition from AMD Ryzen.

Intel Alder Lake Hype: What People Are Excited About

Intel is rumored to release their Alder Lake chips sometime in late 2021, with projections as early as October, according to PC Gamer.

If these rumors are true, then AMD better prepare something good for their next-gen Ryzen chips fast because Team Blue looks like they mean business.

Recent leaked GeekBench numbers saw the 12900K handily beat the Ryzen 9 5950X in both multi-core and single-core workloads.

It was also TUM_APISAK who revealed the numbers: the Intel chip scored 17299 points in multicore against the 5950X's 16868, and 1893 in single-core to the Zen chip's 1702.

Specs Battle: big.LITTLE Packs a Punch

There are no official specs for Intel Alder Lake chips yet, but the rumored ones already look excellent on paper.

Aside from the sky-high power core boost clock, Intel also equipped the 12900K with some serious hardware: 30 MB of cache (they didn't specify whether it's L1, L2, or even L3), as well as full support for high-speed DDR5 memory.

If team blue prices these parts competitively, AMD Ryzen could be in serious trouble.

So far, there's also not much information about next-gen Zen 4 chips, aside from the fact that they're going LGA instead of PGA, and will be built on TSMC's 5nm process, reports TechRadar.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by RJ Pierce