It’s a big day for us here at eTeknix, for Intel, and for the PC community in general, as there’s a lot of kick-ass new hardware hitting the market. There are the new Z690 motherboards with the 12th Gen ready LGA1700 socket, as well as the new Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs. However, both the motherboards and processors bring a suite of new technologies to the market, as well as a few that play catch-up with what AMD has been doing. PCIe 5.0 is rolling out, there’s now PCIe 4.0 M.2 storage, DDR5 is here, the latest Intel WiFi 6, Thunderbolt 4 and more! With all that in mind, it’s hard not to be excited about these new launches.
I’ve got three CPUs in the office today, the Intel Core i5-12600K, i7-12700K and the i9-12900K giving us a good sample of what the range has to offer. However, I’m sure most are really excited to see what the i9 can do, given that it’s the new Intel flagship, but I’m expecting big things from them all. These are the first CPUs from Intel to use their new big.LITTLE design, which mixes larger and faster performance cores, with smaller and more efficiency-focused cores. So the flagship i9-12900K has 8 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores.
There’s also a new cache architecture, offering a shared smart cache between the P and E cores, but there’s also much more memory available on the L2 and L3 cache too. All the CPUs also use the latest Intel 10nm design, with Thread Director, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and have integrated Intel WiFi 6E. There’s also the latest Intel UHD Xe graphics too, however, I suspect we’ll see later models expand on this or models without Xe at some point.
“The 12th Gen Intel® Core™ desktop processor redefines x86 architecture performance. Introducing our new performance hybrid architecture, combining Performance-cores with Efficient-cores to elevate gaming, productivity, and creation. These breakthrough processors intelligently optimize workloads and pave the way for future leaps in processor design. Enjoy the full range of the latest platform innovations like industry-first PCIe 5.0 readiness and DDR5 memory. With Intel® UHD graphics immerse yourself in a visually stunning experience with up to 8K HDR support and the ability to view 4 simultaneous 4K displays. 12th Gen Intel® Core™ desktop processors bring all the features you need to game, work, and create like never before.” – Intel
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