According to the latest leaked info, Intel’s Core i9-12900K is now being sold for around 6900 to 7500 CNY (1064 to 1157 USD) on the Chinese black market. currently, the information is indeed stated to be legit by many sources, however, these samples of Intel’s CPU are only available in small numbers.
The reason behind having a limited quantity of these samples is that there is a great risk of the sample’s source being revealed. Therefore, all the sellers and leakers are still reluctant to share photos of the Alder Lake-S processors.
It is quite common for engineering samples to show up on the black market and even services like eBay. However, these products will be slightly different from the actual product and will have slightly altered specifications than retail samples. for example, they might have different clock speeds, or disabled functionality, however, their design will be similar to the final product.
As intel is yet to release the Alder Lake-S processors nor the LGA 1700 platform is available to those who want to get a taste of the Alder Lake-S platform has to get it from the black market. The specifications of the Core i9-12900K processors are already known. it will offer 8 high-performance Golden Cove cores along with 8 high-efficiency Gracemont mini cores. The total number of cores is 16 however since Gracemont does not support HyperThreading, the 12900K will only offer 24 threads.
Coming to the clock speeds, leaked information so far indicates that the i9-12900K QS will have a boost clock of up to 5.3 GHz for big cores and 3.7 GHz for small cores. In terms of power limits, we have 125W and 228W for PL1 and PL2 values respectively. Intel is expected to debut its Alder Lake-S desktop series in the fourth quarter of this year, so let’s wait for more info to come out.
