The quad-core market has been long diminished thanks to the growing demand for high-end CPUs, however, entry-level users and gamers still prefer an ultra-affordable CPU option. AMD made both the Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X so good that they are never in stock or when they are, they are sold at ridiculous prices.
It seems XFastest has somehow managed to obtain an engineering sample of the upcoming Intel Alder Lake-S Core i3-12100 processor. Intel has only announced the K series of processors, i.e. only a handful of 12th Gen CPUs and so we will see a lot of them being announced very soon, probably at CES 2022 alongside the mobile Alder Lake-P series.
As Videocardz points out, there could be as many as 30 processors for the LGA1700 desktop socket, so enthusiasts will have a great time waiting for their favourite CPU on budget. The Intel Core i3-12100 will be an entry-level option and is a quad-core CPU with up to 8 threads, no mix of small and BIG cores.
According to XFastest, this engineering sample that has been tested comes with a maximum boost clock speed of 4.3 GHz which is pretty decent. Finally, you could see a 10nm based quad-core CPU by Intel with new naming schemes for power limits to Processor Base Power and Maximum Turbo Power. The Intel Core i3-12100 is suspected to have 60W and 77W PBP/MTP respectively.
Not only this, XFastest went on to compare against the likes of AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X using the Intel Core i3-12100 on an ASRock Z690 Steel Legend motherboard with 16GB of DDR4-3600 memory and RTX 3060 Ti GPU.
As you see in the benchmark charts, the engineering sample for Core i3-12100 excels in all tasks including PCMark, Cinebench R23 and others. In PugetBench for Premiere Pro, we see the Intel Core i3-12100 totally beating the likes of AMD Ryzen 3 processors.
Even in gaming too, in Counter-Strike Global Offensive the Core i3-12100 gives more frames per second, so, entry-level gamers wait for the new Intel processors launching in the coming months.
