Intel Alder Lake-S Engineering CPU Sample Leaks With 16 Cores And 24 Threads

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Intel has something big up its sleeve that it plans to reveal on October 27th. Our sneaking suspicion is that the company plans to launch its Alder Lake-S desktop processors and accompanying Z690 chipset for third-party motherboards.

As we fast approach that date, Alder Lake-S engineering samples are coming out of the woodwork, including this latest example that came across the news desk. TUM_APISAK spotted a new engineering sample with 16 physical cores and 24 threads, which leads us to believe that it is an early example of the upcoming Core i9-12900K. In this UserBenchmark listing, the processor has a base clock of 1.8GHz and a turbo clock of around 3.05GHz.

Shipping versions of the Core i9-12900K are rumored to hit a maximum 5.3GHz or 5GHz across all 8 high-performance cores. The 8 efficiency cores can reach a maximum of 3.9GHz, according to previous leaks. Alder Lake processors are quite peculiar in that only the performance cores have HyperThreading enabled. So, in the case of the Core i9-12900K, it will feature 16 physical cores and 24 threads.

The Core i9-12900K will be joined by the "lesser" 12-core/20-thread Core i7-12700K and the 10-core/16-thread Core i5-12600K.

The Alder Lake processors will be built on the Intel 7 process node, which was previously known as 10nm Enhanced SuperFin. Early estimates allege that Alder Lake processors will offer 10 to 15 percent performance-per-watt uplift over current-generation Rocket Lake processors.

With Alder Lake, Intel will leapfrog AMD -- at least initially -- regarding next-generation platform technologies. Alder Lake's supporting Z690 chipset is compliant with both DDR5 memory and the PCIe 5.0 interface. DDR5 memory modules are already available for sale, while the first PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs aren't expected to hit the market until 2022.