Intel® Thread Directorenables the two new core microarchitectures to work seamlessly together by guiding the operating system (OS) to place the right thread on the right core at the right time. Intel has worked with the ecosystem on extensive testing to optimize performance and compatibility, and as part of the company’s reinforced investments in the developer community, has published white papers for developers with guidance on how independent software vendors can optimize applications for performance hybrid platforms. If you want the "world's best gaming processor" today—as in a desktop processor that just plays any PC game you want—you might want to wait and see how the DRM situation shakes out on Alder Lake. But the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X remains a cost-conscious, fuss-free option that kept its station in gaming in Windows 10. We test CPUs using a variety of synthetic benchmarks that offer proprietary scores, as well as real-world tests using consumer apps such as 7-Zip, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Premiere (the latter two using Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop and Premiere extensions), multiplayer games like Rainbow Six: Siege, and AAA 3D games such as Assassin's Creed Valhalla. CPU-Centric Tests All models support up to DDR5-4800, LPDDR5-5200, DDR4-3200, or LPDDR4X-4266 memory, and 28 lanes of PCI Express 4.0/3.0. AMD may still be king of multi-core tasks with the Ryzen 9 5950X, but that doesn't mean the Core i9-12900K is a slouch. Far from it as this CPU boasts impressive single-core scores, as well as decent enough numbers for multi-core tasks that would make AMD sweat slightly. You should not buy this if ...

At the heart of Intel’s processors is a hybrid, or heterogeneous, core design. The desktop processor silicon will have eight performance cores (P-cores) and eight efficiency cores (E-cores), the latter in two groups of four. Each of the cores is designed differently to optimize for their targets, but supports the same software. The goal is that software that is not urgent runs on efficiency cores, but time-sensitive software runs on performance cores, and that has required a new management control between the processor and Windows has been developed to enable Alder Lake to work at its best. That control is fully enabled in Windows 11, and Windows 10 can get most of the way there but doesn’t have all the bells and whistles for finer details – Linux support is in development. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. This resulted in a near-parity gain in our F1 2021 run, as well as around a 5% bump to Cinebench R23 and the Puget Systems/Adobe Photoshop test. Not a huge bump, but also one that was the easiest to achieve given the one-slider tools provided to us by Intel. And while normally we'd take the rest of this section to talk about all the nuances of the results and what they could mean for Intel's new position in PC gamer's minds, there's just one problem we noted: The Core i9-12900K can't play every game. Italics intentional.All models support up to DDR5-4800 or DDR4-3200 memory, and 16 lanes of PCI Express 5.0 + 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0. All models support: SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2, FMA3, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST), Intel 64, XD bit (an NX bit implementation), Intel VT-x, Intel VT-d, Hyper-threading, Turbo Boost 3.0 (2.0 for embedded), AES-NI, Smart Cache, Thread Director, DL Boost, GNA 3.0, and Optanememory. Intel Corporation. "13th Gen Intel® Core™ Mobile Processor Product Brief". Intel . Retrieved January 7, 2023.

First up, CPU tests. We ran the various CPUs below (including the Alder Lake chips) under Windows 10, on appropriate testbeds built fresh for this generation of CPUs. (We also reran some of the tests on the Core i9-12900K under Windows 11 to get Thread Director into the mix.) Thread Director is informed by a new microcontroller on the CPU itself, which will feed Windows 11 more detailed hardware telemetry about the current status of the chip and its cores, versus older releases in Intel's desktop line. Information that was previously left a mystery to Windows—think aspects like thermals, power settings, and which threads can take more instructions—is now communicated to the scheduler in microseconds, leaving almost no impact and (in theory) adding considerable performance gains, depending on the workflow and the various kinds of overhead that can be leveraged. The use of this hybrid design makes some traditional performance measurements difficult to compare. Intel states that individually the performance cores are +19% over 11 th Generation, and the efficiency cores are around 10 th Generation performance levels at much lower power. At peak performance Intel has showcased in slides that four E-cores will outperform two 6 th Generation cores in both performance and power, with the E-core being optimized also for performance per physical unit of silicon. Alternatively, Intel can use all P-cores and all E-cores on a singular task, up to 241W for the Core i9 processor. All models support up to DDR5-5600, or DDR4-3200 memory, up to 16 lanes of PCI Express 5.0, and up to 4 lanes of PCI Express 4.0. If you're after the latest Intel CPU and have the budget to spare, the Intel Core i9-12900K is an impressive feat of engineering. This processor has the best single-core performance compared to AMD's flagship offering, but it also costs less (comparing MSRP) and even beats AMD in some multi-task tests.Suffice to say, from the perspective of a hardware reviewer, this launch is a difficult one to cover. Normally with a new processor we would run A vs B, and that’s most of the data we need aside from some specific edge cases. For this launch, there are other factors to consider: The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X both use eight-core AMD processors, which may prompt game developers to take advantage of more cores. However, the preceding PS4 and Xbox One also use eight-core processors, and it's been seven years since their release without any sign that developers are creating their games to push CPUs past a comfortable four-core max utilization. As one example for gaming, when paired with an NVIDIA RTX 3080, the Core i9 had no issues playing Doom Eternal at 3840x1600 resolution with graphics set to Ultra Nightmare (the highest) with DLSS (Quality), ray tracing enabled, and adaptive refresh — basically maxed out. Specifically, we consistently hit 144 frames-per-second (FPS) without a hitch. However, these results were achievable with the new Core i5-12600, which is just as impressive. As always, it's more about your GPU than CPU still for many top-tier games. cores (eight P-cores and eight E-cores), 24 threads, 150W processor base power,30MB Intel Smart Cache, and PCIe Gen 5.0 and 4.0 support. All models support up to DDR5-5200, LPDDR5-6400, DDR4-3200, or LPDDR4X-4266 memory, up to 16 lanes of PCI Express 5.0, and up to 4 lanes of PCI Express 4.0.

Cutress, Ian (October 8, 2018). "Intel Announces 9th Gen Core CPUs: Core i9-9900K (8-Core), i7-9700K, & i5-9600K". AnandTech. Finally, to close out our testing (we always leave the stress runs for last in case of disaster), our attempts to push the Intel Core i9-12900K to its thermal limits in a 10-minute run through Cinebench 23 in CoreTemp, we found the CPU posted a maximum temperature of 73 degrees C in our testing on a new Corsair iCue 360mm closed-loop liquid cooler.

Also, while the Core i7 is the better choice for gamers looking to maximize the performance of their next build on a budget, you also might want to consider options like the Core i5-11600K. With six cores and 12 threads, the Core i5-11600K can handle almost every PC game on shelves, and it costs a good deal less than current-model desktop chips in either the Core i7 or i9 lines. The difference will ultimately be most obvious in esports titles and with high-refresh-rate monitors that let you show 100fps, 200fps, or more onscreen. Every new degree of freedom to test is arguably a doubling of testing, so in this case 2 3 means 8x more testing than a normal review. Fun times. But the point to drill down to here is the last one. Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. See how we test. In our more limited run of benchmarks on Windows 11 we did find that, in certain circumstances, Thread Director provided a sizable benefit. Sometimes the difference was negligible (for example, Cinebench R23, POV-Ray, and gaming tests all stayed roughly the same), while in others like the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere runs, we saw an improvement of nearly 30% in both benchmarks. Whether that means it's 30% faster in Windows 11 or 30% slower in Windows 10 is all a matter of your vantage point. This will help to explain the core/thread disparity that you'll see in the specs below, as only the P-cores will be Hyper-Threaded this time around (that is, supporting two processing threads per P-core), while E-cores will support just one thread per core.

For most people looking for a new processor to build or upgrade a gaming PC, we'd recommend the Core i9-12900K for value and performance. Sure, you lose a few threads to AMD that results in a few losses with multi-core tasks, but Intel makes up for this with unmatched single-core capabilities. As an all-rounder, you can't falter the Core i9-12900K. It's been the case for years that more cores and threads don't necessarily lead to better performance and Alder Lake offers further proof through impressive results. As well as this new array of cores and threads, Intel also opened up support for DDR5 RAM and PCIe 5.0 with Alder Lake, snatching the standards lead from AMD.The idea is that with Windows 11, it all works. With Windows 10, it almost all works. The main difference Intel told us is although Windows 10 can separate cores apart, and hyperthreads, it doesn’t really understand efficiency that well. So its decisions are made more in regards to performance requirements, rather than performance vs efficiency. At the end of the day, all this should mean to the user is that Windows 10 tries to minimizes the run-to-run variation, but Windows 11 does it better. Ultimate best-case performance shouldn’t change in any serious way: a single thread on a P-core, or across several P-cores for example, should perform the same. Let’s Talk Testing