Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake lineup continues to outpace AMD's Ryzen offerings as the newly leaked benchmarks of the Core i9-12900KS 5.5 GHz show that it's faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X in single & multi-threaded performance tests.

Intel Core i9-12900KS 5.5 GHz CPU Wrecks AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X In Leaked Single & Multi-Core Benchmarks

While the Intel Core i9-12900KS doesn't launch until next month, it's already been listed and being sold by various retailers. Some lucky buyers have got their chips early and proceeded to take snaps of the packaging while others have posted benchmarks. Reddit user, Seby9123, is one such person who managed to get the chip and has posted the first benchmarks of the retail unit.

Intel Core i9-12900KS 5.5 GHz CPU Specifications

The Intel Core i9-12900KS will be the flagship chip in the 12th Gen Alder Lake Desktop CPU lineup. It will feature 8 Golden Cove cores and 8 Gracemont cores for a total of 16 cores (8+8) and 24 threads (16+8).

Intel Core i9-12900KS 5.5 GHz CPU smiles for the camera. (Image Credits: u/Seby9123)

The P-cores (Golden Cove) will operate at a maximum boost frequency of up to 5.5 GHz with 1-2 active cores and 5.2 GHz with all-cores active while the E-cores (Gracemont) will operate at 3.90 GHz across 1-4 cores and up to 3.7 GHz when all cores are loaded. The CPU will feature 30 MB of L3 cache.

The main change is that to accommodate the higher frequency, Intel has upped the base TDP by 25 Watts over the Core i9-12900K. As such, the 12900KS will feature a base TDP of 150W, and the max turbo power rating has also been bumped by 19W to 260W (vs 241W).

Intel Core i9-12900KS 5.5 GHz CPU Benchmarks

Coming to the benchmarks, the user was running an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 APEX motherboard along with 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6200 (CL36) memory modules. The cooling solution is not told & it looks like the Intel Core i9-12900KS CPU was tested in both stock & overclocked conditions within the Cinebench R23 benchmark.

In stock, the CPU has some interesting clock speeds with 2 P-Cores running at 5.5 GHz and the rest running at 5.2 GHz while the E-Cores run at 4.0 GHz. With these clocks, the chip scored 2162 points in single-core and 29164 points in multi-core tests.

But since the CPU can be overclocked and doesn't have any restrictions like the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, it was pushed to 5.4 GHz across all P-Cores and 4.2 GHz across all E-Cores. The CPU V-Core voltage is seen maxing out at 1.418V which is on the high side and the CPU did get really hot, getting close to the 100C wall while consuming an insane 319W of power but it was able to break the 30K score on Cinebench R23.

There's also one run in which the user only enabled the P-Cores and overclocked them to 5.3 GHz with 1.341V. The CPU scored 20510 points in the multi-threaded benchmark and consumed a max of 187W power. For comparison, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X scores around 21K points and that's with 12 cores and 24 threads whereas the P-Cores amount to just 8 cores and 16 threads.

Cinebench R23 (Higher is Better)

Multi-Thread

0

7000

14000

21000

28000

35000

42000

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7000

14000

21000

28000

35000

42000

Core i9-12900KS (OC) 30.9k

Core i9-12900KS (Stock) 29.2k

Core i9-12900K 27.5k

Ryzen 9 5950X 25.7k

Core i9-10980XE 24.6k

Ryzen 9 3950X 24.1k

Ryzen 9 5900X 21.1k

Core i9-12900KS (P-Core OC) 20.5k

Ryzen 9 3900X 18.2k

Core i5-12600K 17.9k

Core i9-10900K 16k

Core i9-10850K 16k

Core i9-11900K 16k

Ryzen 7 5800X 15.4k

Core i7-10700K 12.7k

Ryzen 7 3700X 12.5k

Core i9-9900KS 12.3k

Core i9-9900K 12.3k

As you can tell from the benchmarks, not only is the Intel Core i9-12900KS a good 6% faster than the 12900K at stock but it crushes the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X with a lead of up to 14%. And that's just multi-threaded performance which is Zen 3's strongest suit. In single-threaded performance, the Intel chip ends up around 35% faster which is very impressive and would help Intel retain its king of the hill status in gaming too even when the 5800X3D launches. Now the KS does come at an extra cost over the standard K variant and also consumes more power but it is built for that enthusiast who wants the fastest chip he can get hands on.

Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake Desktop CPU Specs