Intel Alder Lake i3 Chips Are FASTER Than AMD Ryzen 3 Series, According To Latest Leak

Intel has only released mid-range and high-end Alder Lake chips so far (i5, i7, and i9), but that's likely to change soon enough.

A new leak seems to point to an entry-level i3 series in Intel's new 12th gen CPU lineup, reports WCCFTech. The rumored Core i3-12100 chip is said to be part of a non-K (meaning no overclocking) Alder Lake family, and is reportedly faster than anything from AMD's Ryzen 3 series.

Just like every Intel Alder Lake CPU below the i5-12600K, the i3-12100 will not be featuring Team Blue's hybrid, Arm-based architecture or big.LITTLE. Meaning that it will not feature P and E cores, but rather all P cores with hyperthreading: 4 cores and 8 threads, to be specific.

This leak points to an alleged early review that saw the entry-level Alder Lake chip pitted against the AMD Ryzen 3300X, according to Tom's Hardware. The review comes from a Chinese site called XFastest.

In the XFastest review, the i3-12100 was tested in two popular games ("Cyberpunk 2077" and "CS:GO"), as well as a total of eight productivity workloads, against the Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100.

The scores were reportedly not even close, especially in productivity. The upcoming budget Intel Alder Lake chip demolished both the 3300X and the 3100 in all tests except the 7-Zip decompression benchmark, where the 3300X outperformed the i3 by roughly 13.7%.

In the gaming benchmarks, the i3 paired with an NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti graphics card led by as much as 18% as soon as the reviewers bumped up the graphical details alongside features like ray tracing and DLSS (in "Cyberpunk, specifically).

In "CS:GO," the performance gain was more modest at around 8%, but it's still a gain, nonetheless.

Intel Core i3-12100: The New Budget King?

When AMD launched the Ryzen 3 3300X last year, it was immediately crowned as the price-to-performance king when it comes to gaming CPUs. At an MSRP of $120, the 3300X was an almost unbeatable bargain for the gaming performance it offers.

With the Intel Core i3-12100, though, it might soon lose that price-to-performance crown. That's because according to the original XFastest review, the chip might retail for $1,000 HKD, or just above $128 USD.

Given the performance gains ranging from 13% to as much as 81% in specific gaming and workload tasks, an $8 premium is certainly hard to pass up.

Furthermore, the rumored pricing is also consistent with early retail listings of its integrated graphics-less brother, the i3-12100F. That chip apparently retails for around $119, according to Tom's Hardware.

Alder Lake Reclaiming Intel's Throne

Intel still largely dominates the CPU market with a 75.4% market share as of early November, according to Digital Trends. But they haven't been as competitive during the same time period, mainly because of AMD's massive strides with their Ryzen lineup.

Only with their 12th gen Alder Lake chips did Team Blue seem to finally rise up and take back the territory they've lost to Team Red. The new-generation Intel CPUs, barring any issues, have been giving AMD's offerings a run for their money.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by RJ Pierce