Traditionally built for lower-power, lower-performance processors, Intel has decided that its Atom architecture may find a use in more powerful processors after all, and the Core i9 12900K features eight Gracemont Efficient Cores in total.
The Efficient Cores are built on the Gracemont architecture, whose origins are in the Atom lineup. From there, they're hooked up to 30MB of Intel Smart Cache, which is also shared between E-Cores and onboard integrated graphics (disabled in KF-series chips).įor a marker of performance, the Core i9 12900K's P-Cores are able to surpass the Cypress Cove cores in the Core i9 11900K by a significant margin, and we're yet to touch on the eight Efficient Cores that Intel has stuffed into the 12900K's back pocket. That's AMD's savvy Zen 3 architecture, by the by.Įach P-Core has access to 1.25MB of L2 cache. They're also built to minimise latency, and they're technically wider and smarter to catch up with the competition. They offer the highest clock speeds of the two-on the Core i9 12900K these reach 5.2GHz at times-and nail down slick single-threaded speed for it.
Consider the 12900K's eight P-Cores in much the same way, although considerably faster.įor gaming these P-Cores are key. Take the Core i9 10900K, for example, which has eight CPU cores in total. It doesn't get any easier, either, but it is quite a bit more exciting for it.Īlder Lake's P-Cores are more closely related to the CPU cores of previous Intel desktop generations. Alder Lake is like a Russian nesting doll of architectures. In desktop terms, that's roughly two steps on the architectural marathon from the backported Sunny Cove microarchitecture, renamed Cypress Cove, in Intel's 11th Gen Rocket Lake desktop processors, such as the Core i9 10900K.Īnd you're probably already thinking that's a lot of architectural codenames, and you'd be right. The P-Cores are based on the Golden Cove microarchitecture, which is one step beyond the Willow Lake microarchitecture found in Intel's 11th Gen mobile Tiger Lake processors. What this means is that Intel is stuffing all of the K-series 12th Gen chips, those which are arriving at launch, with two types of cores: Performance Cores (P-Cores) and Efficient Cores (E-Cores). The most notable change of the lot for Intel Alder Lake, though, is the hybrid Core architecture.
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With Alder Lake, it's no longer tied to that node, so it's free to do more in the space it's got, and the company says it even expects to shift a lot of Alder Lake chips this side of New Year So perhaps this is some silicon you'll actually be able to buy at launch. Intel has finally broken free the shackles of 14nm and managed to escape the node that was once so congested it caused a fairly embarrassing pile-up for the chipmaker. Alder Lake is Intel's first desktop processor to use the Intel 7 process node, which was previously referred to as Intel 10nm SuperFin, and also the first in a very long time to not use the 14nm process node. So let's dig into it, starting with the process that defines the entire chip: Intel 7. The most notable change of the lot for Intel Alder Lake is the hybrid Core architecture. All of which makes for fascinating analysis. With that comes frame rates, OS requirements, and idiosyncrasies.
At its simplest, that equates to more cores, more speed, and more bandwidth than ever before, but if you dig beneath the surface you'll find a chip architecture that is wildly different to what came before. The Core i9 12900K represents the very best in Intel's desktop 12th Generation processors, and what that means is it houses the Alder Lake architecture in its most performant form. (Image credit: Future) What's different about the Intel Core i9 12900K?