Intel’s Alder Lake will finally and officially be here soon and with the arrival of its 12th generation family, Intel will officially be saying its farewell to the traditional nomenclature describing processor power, namely Thermal Design Power (TDP).
The value is normally referred to as PL1 (Power Limit 1) which has now been renamed to Processor Base Power (PBP). And team blue’s CPUs are known to notoriously go beyond advertised TDP, which was often caused by the extended duration (Tau) of PL2 (Power Limit 2) by motherboard vendors.
However, the company has now decided to move ahead of the TDP nomenclature in favour of PBP and Maximum Turbo Power (MTP), previously referred to as PL2. The new nomenclature is now being used by Intel in marketing slides, which also include its official performance metrics.
For we still have a long way to go before a get correct and detailed performance metrics, which is why we can only find not-so-accurate official performance charts compiled before Microsoft and AMD released an L3 latency fix for Ryzen CPUs on Windows 11 operating system.
Fortunately, Wofstame, who is Lenovo China Gaming Desktop Product Planning Manager, have recently mistakenly leaked a chart featuring a comparison of Alder Lake CPUs in PL1 and PL2 modes in the Cinebench R20 multi-thread benchmark.
- Intel Core i9-12900K: PL2 – 10180, PL1 – 7492, PL2/PL1 – 136%
- Intel Core i7-12700K: PL2 – 8677, PL1 – 6689, PL2/PL1 – 130%
- Intel Core i5-12600K: PL2 – 6551 , PL1 – 5953 , PL2/PL1 – 110%
if the results are to be believed, then a flagship 16-core Core i9-12900K would see 36% higher performance in PL1=PL2 mode compared to stock settings. The Core i7-12700K will also be 30% faster and Intel’s 10-core i5-12600K will be seeing a 10% benefit when forcing MTP mode.
Intel’s Alder Lake is just a couple of days away from hitting the market, so we expect to hear more from the line-up pretty soon.
Intel 12th Gen Core Series (Alder Lake-S) | ||||||
VideoCardz | Cores / Threads | E-Core (Base/Boost) | P-Core (Base/Boost) | Turbo Boost Max 3.0 | PL1/PL2 PBP/MTP | MSRP |
i9-12900K | 8C+8c/24T | 2.4/3.9 GHz | 3.2/5.1 GHz | 5.2 GHz | 125/241W | 589 USD |
i9-12900KF | 8C+8c/24T | 2.4/3.9 GHz | 3.2/5.1 GHz | 5.2 GHz | 125/241W | 564 USD |
i7-12700K | 8C+4c/20T | 2.7/3.8 GHz | 3.6/4.9 GHz | 5.0 GHz | 125/190W | 409 USD |
i7-12700KF | 8C+4c/20T | 2.7/3.8 GHz | 3.6/4.9 GHz | 5.0 GHz | 125/190W | 384 USD |
i5-12600K | 6C+4c/16T | 2.8/3.6 GHz | 3.7/4.9 GHz | n/a | 125/150W | 289 USD |
i5-12600KF | 6C+4c/16T | 2.8/3.6 GHz | 3.7/4.9 GHz | n/a | 125/150W | 264 USD |