Intel is gearing for its biggest launch of this year, which is going to be the company’s 12th generation Alder Lake-S Desktop CPU family and the Z690 motherboard lineup.
This time Intel is planning a big game as it is not only bringing a new architecture & IPC improvements to the market, but the blue team is treating us to an entirely new chip design which is getting an overhaul with the 12th Gen Core family being the first consumer-centric desktop launch of a hybrid x86 processor.
Coming to the line-up we know that the Intel Alder Lake-S Desktop CPU will be including the 12th Gen Core processors and team blue is planning on kicking off the line-up with the introductory ‘K’ and ‘Non-K’ chips. The rest of the mainstream variants will follow suit with a few weeks of the initial release.
According to sources, the Intel 12th Gen Core processor lineup along with the Z690 motherboards will be readily available on 19th November. The company also plans on holding a pre-launch announcement where they would disclose the prices, specifications, and general performance numbers of their next-gen family during 27th & 28th October during the ‘Innovation’ event.
Alder Lake will reportedly have Golden Cove architecture on the Performance Cores and the Gracemont architecture on the Efficiency Cores. Team Blue is going for a complete rehauling of its desktop platform in the form of the 600-series chipsets. The new 600-series will debut with the Z690 motherboards that are going to support both K and non-K chips.
Going into detail about the new changes to Intel’s desktop platform we know that the Alder Lake will be featuring support on the brand new 600-series platform which would include the Z690 motherboards. These boards will carry the LGA 1700 socket designed around Alder Lake and future generation CPUs, the flagship Z690 motherboards will be able to support DDR5 memory with native speeds of up to 4800 MHz whereas cheaper motherboards based on mainstream & budget-tier chipsets (H670, B650, H610) will retain DDR4-3200 support.
As for the rest of the features for 600-series chipset motherboards, you can see them below:
- eDP / 4DDI (DP, HDMI) Display Capabilities
- 2-Channel (Up To DDR5-4800 / Up To DDR4-3200) Memory Support
- x16 PCIe 5.0 / x4 PCIe 4.0 Lanes (CPU)
- PCIe Express 4.0 & PCIe Express 3.0 Support (600-Series Chipset)
- SATA 3.0
- Integrated WiFi 6E
- Discrete Thunderbolt 4 (USB 4 Compliant)
- USB3 (20G) / USB3 (10G) / USB3 (5G) / USB 2.0
- Intel LAN PHY
- Intel Optane Memory H20 (H10 Successor)
Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake Desktop CPU Specs “Rumored”
| CPU Name | P-Core Count | E-Core Count | Total Core / Thread | P-Core Base / Boost (Max) | P-Core Boost (All-Core) | E-Core Base / Boost | E-Core Boost (All-Core) | Cache | TDP (PL1) | TDP (PL2) | Price |
| Intel Core i9-12900K | 8 | 8 | 16 / 24 | 3.2 / 5.3 GHz | 5.0 GHz (All Core) | TBA / 3.9 GHz | 3.7 GHz (All Core) | 30 MB | 125W | 228W | TBA |
| Intel Core i7-12700K | 8 | 4 | 12 / 20 | 3.6 / 5.0 GHz | 4.7 GHz (All Core) | TBA / 3.8 GHz | 3.6 GHz (All Core) | 25 MB | 125W | 228W | TBA |
| Intel Core i5-12600K | 6 | 4 | 10 / 16 | 3.7 / 4.9 GHz | 4.5 GHz (All Core) | TBA / 3.6 GHz | 3.4 GHz (All Core) | 20 MB | 125W | 228W | TBA |
