Intel's Alder Lake line of CPUs is coming in the next couple of months and though there is some suggestion it could require a literal sun to power them, the performance numbers starting to leak our are incredibly tasty. An Intel 12900K was reprotedly benchmarked in Cinebench R23 and achieved a staggering score of 30,549 points. That's almost double that of high-end CPUs like the Ryzen 5800X, and comparable to a 32 core Threadripper 2990WX.
This should definitely be taken with a healthy portion of salt, as there are some things about these results which smell a little fishy. This 12900K reportedly has an 8+8 configuration, meaning it has eight Golden Cove cores, and eight Gracemonth cores, offering 24 thread support. No CPUz results have been shown with that configuration correctly picked up yet, which may mean these screengrabs are fabricated, as per Videocardz.
Still, the results are tantalising. It's faster than the full-fat 16-core 5950X, which typically scores around 28,000 points, and suggests that the Gracemont "little" cores of Alder Lake can hold their own in multithreaded workloads.
The only advantage it has elsewhere in the system is that these results were reportedly achieved with DDR5 5200 memory -- much faster than the typical DDR4 used in Ryzen and 11th-generation Intel CPUs. What kind of advantage that gives it is hard to fathom at this point, but it's worth taking into consideration.
Just as exciting about Alder Lake CPUs is their potential for single threaded performance. The big IPC boost of Intel's first desktop 10nm architecture should lead to some big improvements in gaming and limited-thread applications, giving AMD a real run for its money and likely retaking the gaming crown.
Image source: Videocardz