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Thus, we all give or money to those that we think they deserve out money. And we don't give to those that don't. Overall, there's little contest to be shown here; overwhelmingly, the Intel Core i9-12900K, with its 16 available cores and 24 available threads, was able to beat out the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X's 32 threads in almost every content-creation task we threw its way. And that's without Thread Director in play. This resulted in a near-parity gain in our F1 2021 run, as well as around a 5% bump to Cinebench R23 and the Puget Systems/Adobe Photoshop test. Not a huge bump, but also one that was the easiest to achieve given the one-slider tools provided to us by Intel. With a TDP of 65 W, the Core i9-12900 consumes typical power levels for a modern PC. Intel's processor supports DDR4 and DDR5 memory with a dual-channel interface. For communication with other components in the computer, Core i9-12900 uses a PCI-Express Gen 5 connection. This processor features the UHD Graphics 770 integrated graphics solution. Intel processor numbers are not a measure of performance. Processor numbers differentiate features within each processor family, not across different processor families. See http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor-numbers.html for details.
We tested the CPUs here on their respective platforms in Windows 10 using a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti card. As you can see from our gaming runs above, things are actually quite close between the two processors, despite 12th Gen's ostensible platform and newness advantage. Between the two, the difference falls nearly within the margin of error for all tests aside from 3DMark, and that score is one that more accurately reflects the system advantage as a whole, rather than just the performance of the chip on its own. That scheduler, then, is a key player, especially when the CPU's resources are much in demand. (And that demand is the point of buying any high-end CPU!) So, speaking of schedulers...meet Windows Thread Director, the ostensible Spielberg of the whole scheme. Windows Thread Director The Core i9 brand was expanded to incorporate mainstream processors in October 2018, following the release of the Core i9-9900K processor, which uses Intel's mainstream consumer platform. [5] Desktop processors [ edit ] Skylake-X (14 nm, 7th generation) [ edit ] Meanwhile, the Photoshop and Premiere Pro benchmarks designed by Puget Systems involve many different task types—file retrieval, storage, image rendering, editing operations, and the like—that are run in sequence. This gives Thread Director "something to do," as it were, sidelining resources when the load of the run is lighter, and then redistributing them when it's time to render or edit. The result is a clear improvement in the overall score, and at face value, it suggests that you could save a reasonable amount of time working in an Adobe program on a Windows 11-based Intel Core i9-12900K machine, versus on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, or on a Core i9-12900K running on Windows 10.
Intel® Quick Sync Video
Alder Lake chips expose up to 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and an additional four lanes of PCIe 4.0 from the chip for M.2 storage.Those lanes are split into x16 or x8 for GPUs, or x4/x4 for storage slots. PCIe AICs (Add-In Cards) that support PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs (which don't exist yet) are already in the works. Note: All of these test runs above were performed on their respective AMD and Intel testbeds under Windows 10.)
As a result, threads can and will land on the incorrect cores under some circumstances, which Intel warned could result in higher run-to-run variability in benchmarks. It will also impact the chips during normal use with Windows 10, too. Leveraging Intel's so-called "7 Process," the company's launch of its new 12th Generation desktop CPUs sees the new chips built on 10nm lithography, finally breaking the company out of its half-decade love/hate affair with the 14nm process and its subsequent "14nm+"-based iterations that followed for years after. (Read more in-depth about how Intel defines its "7 Process" at ExtremeTech.) Thread Director is informed by a new microcontroller on the CPU itself, which will feed Windows 11 more detailed hardware telemetry about the current status of the chip and its cores, versus older releases in Intel's desktop line. Information that was previously left a mystery to Windows—think aspects like thermals, power settings, and which threads can take more instructions—is now communicated to the scheduler in microseconds, leaving almost no impact and (in theory) adding considerable performance gains, depending on the workflow and the various kinds of overhead that can be leveraged.All Alder Lake chips support DDR4-3200 or up to DDR5-4800 memory, but caveats apply. Alder Lake chips expose up to 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 (technically for storage and graphics only, no networking devices) and an additional four lanes of PCIe 4.0 from the chip for M.2 storage. We'll cover those details further below. Intel's Thread Director is a hardware-based technology that assures threads are assigned to either the P or E cores in an optimized manner. This is the sleeper tech that enables the hybrid architecture. Ryzen, Ryzen, Ryzen! With apologies to The Brady Bunch: For more than a few years now, everywhere you look, AMD has been dominating the content-creator market for desktop CPUs. Through multiple generations of the Zen architecture, starting in 2017, AMD has defined new limits of cores-for-the-money, revolutionizing the kind of desktop power available for media-minded applications. Professional creative users and prosumers alike couldn't be happier with the trend.
With the introduction of hybrid architecture to the desktop market, however, Intel had to get creative. On a chip where the cores aren't homogenous, without a little extra help, Windows won't know which cores it can send programs to most optimally. Enter Thread Director. We ran the Photoshop and Premiere Pro versions of these benchmarks, which showed some impressive results that shouldn't be shoved aside as mere marketing hoopla. (More on that in a minute.) New Day, New Power Definitions We also need to close out this section with a caveat: Intel's 12th Gen processors may not work on every single game, regardless of your operating system. During our testing, we found that our Assassin's Creed: Valhalla benchmark title wouldn't boot in. Only after consulting with Intel did we find out this is due to an issue with the DRM service Denuvo, which can confuse the two core types of 12th Gen as two separate systems as tasks shift in and out of the cores. You can read all about the issue, as well as look through a list of the affected titles and their timetables for an applied fix, in our full breakdown here.
By most of the measures we've gathered here today, it's clear that the move to 10nm and Intel 7 Process has done wonders for Intel's competitiveness on the desktop in mainstream content creation on chips like the Core i9-12900K versus previous generations. But those wins come at a price. Think of the scheduler as a traffic cop for Windows 11 (or any modern OS, for that matter): It tells bits of programs where they should each run on a processor, based on a variety of factors. That includes thermal/cooling capacity, available power draw, performance peaks, and task/thread priority. This process is relatively straightforward on traditional desktop-processor designs, and it works the same, in principle, on Windows 10 as it has in previous versions. However, as you can see, there are still a few kinks that Intel has yet to work out when testing in Windows 10, such as in our POV-Ray run. It should be noted, though, that those aren't down to outright diminished performance as much as they are the idiosyncrasies that come with using an Intel Core i9-12900K on a Windows 10 system. For content creators, the cost proposition of 12th Gen perks up, thanks to several outright wins that prove Intel's 16 cores are, in select cases, just as capable in performance as AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X. But on cost of adoption, the percentages are still skewed in AMD's favor for many PC builders and upgraders. That aspect, and that AMD chips will play just about any game that works on your chosen version of Windows...not whatever gets patched on Windows 11 on a game-by-game basis. Any game, almost any OS. We didn't think that would be a point in the "Pros" column for any processor launched in 2021, but Intel's first major foray into desktop big.LITTLE seems not without its own initial complications. All models support up to DDR5-5600 or DDR4-3200 memory, and 16 lanes of PCI Express 5.0 + 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0.
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