ON October 28th this year, at the Intel ON Technology Innovation Summit, Intel unveiled the mystery of the 12th generation Intel Core processor product family, and introduced six new unlocked desktop processors, including the 12th generation Intel Core i9-12900K, the world's outstanding game processor. With a turbo frequency of up to 5.2GHz and specifications of up to 16 cores and 24 threads, the new processor can release higher multithreading performance for game enthusiasts and professional creators.

The 12th generation Core adopted two CPU cores for the first time, one is performance core (P core) and the other is energy efficiency core (E core). The design of the core P is more traditional, which is a continuation of the Core family. It is optimized for single-thread and light-thread performance, and is suitable for high-load games and productivity applications. The design of E-core is closer to Atom Atom family, which optimizes multi-thread performance and minimizes the impact on foreground task management. Simply put, P-core+E-core is not a big and small core architecture, but more like the relationship between super-large core and big core. Among them, i9-12900K integrates 8 P cores and 8 E cores, and the total number of threads is 20.

Recently, bilibili Upmaster @ geek bay made a detailed evaluation of the strongest i9-12900K among the 12th generation desktop core, including the performance and power consumption test of i9-12900K core, and the performance with i5-12600K, i9-11900K, i9-10900K, AMD R9 5950X and R7 5800X.

According to the test data of @ geek bay based on CineBench R23, the score of Intel i9-12900K is 1991, which is 21% higher than the 11th generation Core i9-11900K and 23% higher than AMD R9 5960X. In terms of multi-core performance, the score of i9-12900K is 27726, which is 78% higher than that of i9-11900K, 67.3% higher than that of i9-10900K, 77% higher than that of AMD R7 5800X and only slightly lower than that of AMD R9 5950X. It should be pointed out here that AMD R9 5950X has 16 large cores, while i9-12900K has only 8 large cores.

In the performance tests of Adobe(2022), the test scores of i9-12900K in DDR4 memory are better than those of i5-12600K and AMD R9 5950X. In DD5 memory, i9-12900K performs better than DDR4.

In the tests of CS GO, DOTA2, League of Legends, Final Fantasy 14 and other games (1920× 1080 resolution, the highest picture quality, with RTX3090 graphics card), the test scores of i9-12900K in DDR4 memory are also better than those of i5-12600K and AMD R9 5950X. Only the performance of DOTA2 is slightly inferior to AMD R9 5950X. Under DD5 memory, the performance of i9-12900K is not as good as that of DDR4.

@ geek bay said that this is mainly due to the fact that although DDR5 has a larger bandwidth, it also has a larger delay, and for games, delay is often more important than bandwidth.

In addition, let's look at the comparison of CPU temperature control and power consumption. In the constant frequency test, i9-12900K is limited to only 8 large cores (P cores), and the main frequency is limited to 4GHz. In the test of CineBench R23, the single-core score is 1569, the multi-core score is 16544, the power consumption is 80.9W, and the CPU temperature is 42 degrees. As a comparison, it can be seen that i9-12900K is much better than AMD R7 5800X (single core performance is about 18.9% higher, multi-core performance is about 21.2% higher) in both single-core and multi-core performance, and it is also the best in CPU temperature, but its power consumption is indeed higher than AMD R7 5800X.

On the whole, the comprehensive performance of Intel i9-12900K in related software and game tests is stronger than AMD's flagship desktop processor R9 5950X with more cores. Especially in single-core performance, even the 12th-generation Core i5-12600K is 15% higher than AMD R9 5950X, which shows that it is based on the strength of the new 12th-generation Core. Moreover, while the performance is greatly improved, the CPU temperature of i9-12900K is also controlled lower. Although the power consumption of i9-12900K is about 17.6% higher than that of R7 5800X, it is still very cost-effective for desktop processors to exchange about 17.6% power consumption for about 20% performance improvement.

Next, let's compare the performance and power consumption of i9-12900K's small core (e-core) with Apple M1 processor. Because i9-12900K can't only open the small core (e-core), in order to calculate the small core (e-core) and power consumption performance of i9-12900K, first, under the condition of limiting the main frequency of 4GHz and fully opening 16 cores, the multi-core running score of i9-12900K reaches 27,685 points, and the power consumption is 185.5 W; With only 8 large cores (P cores), the score is 20,349, and the power consumption is 168.2W W.. By subtracting the score and power consumption of only 8 large cores from the score and power consumption of 16 cores fully open, it is simply calculated that the small core (e-core) of i9-12900K contributes 7336 points with 17.3W power consumption. In contrast, the CineBench R23 test score of Apple's M1 processor is 7823, and the power consumption is 15W.

That is to say, the performance and power consumption of the small core (e-core) of Intel's 12th-generation Core i9-12900K are already very close to those of Apple M1. However, i9-12900K adopts Intel 7 process, which is equivalent to TSMC's 7nm process, while Apple M1 is based on TSMC's 5nm process. Therefore, if both processes are in the same process (TSMC's 5nm performance can be improved by about 15% compared with 7nm at the same power consumption), the energy efficiency ratio of E-core of i9-12900K may be even better than Apple M1.

However, on October 19th this year, Apple has launched a brand-new M1 Pro and M1 Max processor with stronger performance based on TSMC's second-generation 5nm process. According to the data released by Apple, the CPU performance of its M1 Pro is up to 70% faster than that of M1. If compared with Apple M1 Pro, what about the overall performance of i9-12900K?

In addition, according to the actual measurement of netizens, in Geekbench test, the average multi-core score of Core i9-12900K is 18,500, compared with that of M1 Pro and M1 Max, which is about 12,500. That is to say, the multi-core performance of i9-12900K is 50% higher than that of.

Although the overall performance of the Core i9-12900K is better than that of M1 Pro and M1 Max, its power consumption is also much higher. The power consumption of the Intel i9-12900K is as high as 125W at the base frequency and 241W using Turbo Boost. While M1 Max is no more than 92W.

Of course, Apple M1 Pro/M1 Max adopts TSMC's second-generation 5nm process, which is much cheaper than i9-12900K based on Intel 7 process. In addition, i9-12900K itself is a desktop processor, so its power consumption is naturally higher than that of the mobile platform. With the subsequent launch of Intel's 12th generation Core mobile platform, it is fairer to compare it with Apple's M1 Pro or M1 Max.

According to the latest news, Apple's new generation M2 processor has been designed and is ready to enter the trial production stage. At the same time, Apple is still developing the third generation M3 series processor, which will upgrade the 3nm process and the CPU architecture to Arm's new ARMv9 architecture. According to the data of Arm, the Arm processor based on ARMv9 will keep the IPC performance improved by more than 30%, and the CPU performance is expected to increase by more than 40% in addition to the frequency increase brought by the 3nm process. It is expected that M3 series processors will be launched in 2023.

However, Intel's processor iteration and process technology are also accelerating, and the advantages of the new Alder Lake platform architecture with P-core and E-core have emerged, especially in the process technology, and Intel is also accelerating.

According to Intel's plan, we will mass-produce Intel 4 process in the second half of 2022, Intel 3 process in the second half of 2023, Intel 20A process in 2024 and Intel 18A process in 2025. This year, the rate of process updating is much faster than before.

If Intel's manufacturing process can be completely promoted according to Roadmap, Intel's subsequent processor products will get more blessings from advanced manufacturing processes, and the manufacturing process advantages of Apple's processors from TSMC will gradually disappear in the subsequent competition with Intel processors. By then, Intel will be expected to regain a stronger lead in Apple processors.

It is worth mentioning that not long ago, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, said in an interview with "Axios on HBO" that "Apple decided to make better chips than ours, and they really did a good job, so I have to create better chips than them. I hope Intel can win back this part and many other businesses over time. "

Kissinger pointed out: "In addition to better products, the Intel ecosystem is also more open than Apple's. I hope to give more convincing reasons to developers and users, and ask them to choose Intel-based products. So I will strive for this business. This process may take several years. "

So, can Intel recapture the order of Apple's Mac processor in the future, or can it win the OEM order of Apple's A/M series processors by virtue of its leading manufacturing process? Let's wait and see.

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