Intel has indeed for the first time in years have made something that gamers could really rejoice in the form of 12th Gen Alder Lake desktop processors. It has already announced the overclockable ‘K-series’ CPUs and at CES 2022 it will announce the 65W based remaining options for consumers.
After Pat Gelsinger took over Intel’s CEO, there has been turbulence in Intel’s core philosophy, for the first time Intel has aggressively been investing to build more semiconductor foundries and focus on its fundamental principles. The 12th Gen is a start of this and Intel has made it clear with its lineup that they want to compete with AMD.
Being the x86 architecture owner, Intel has seen a downward flow in its performance curve and certainly for the last 4-5 years have never introduced anything that would excite gamers. But these 10nm based Alder Lake processors have certainly made a positive impact already and now we will see more of these CPUs coming next year.
The regular leaker @momomo_us has leaked Best Buy’s listing of twelve new processors ranging from $59.99 to $529.99. The lineup starts with the very affordable Pentium G7400 and the Pentium G6900 processors at $59.99 and $79.99 price, respectively.
The entire lineup contains a variety of Core i3, i5, i7, and i9 models, some are overclockable, some lack iGPU to save costs while some have iGPU for those who need it. The best new CPU from Intel has to be the upcoming Core i9-12900 and the Core i9-12900F, priced at $529.99 and $509.99 respectively.
With 8 performance and 8 efficiency cores as we see in its flagship brother Core i9 12900K, which we reviewed weeks back, this 65W offering provides more value as it comes with 16 cores out of the box. Even the upcoming Core i7 12700 and 12700F will offer more value than the current overclockable Core i7s which now possess 14 cores, 8 being Performance and 4 being efficient.
The lower-end Intel Core i5-12600 to the Core i5-12400F all feature 6 performance cores/12 threads much as they used to be previously. On the other hand, Intel has not skipped out on the budget Core i3 options as well which will have four performance cores/eight threads and the Pentiums with two P-cores/four threads.
To further add to the value offering all of these 65W based Intel CPUs will come with a box-cooler, most of them will come with an RM1 stock cooler while the Core i9s with a fancy RH1 cooler while the Pentium ones with RS1 coolers. Read More about these coolers from here: Intel’s upcoming new stock CPU coolers leaked in full glory
I don’t think AMD cares. Intel has no choice but to sell them at that price to try and pump their sales numbers before next earnings. The new Intel CPUs have yet to hit the top 5 CPUs sold in Amazon, microcenter or new egg.