First Intel Alder Lake CPUs Fully Unveiled, Specs and Pricing Confirmed

Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs have finally been unveiled in full and, frankly, saying that they’ve piqued our interest would truly be an understatement! This is what the future of x86 computing looks like. Well, at least according to Intel. It still remains to be seen whether this huge architectural shift really is as game-changing as “team blue” claims, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t say that it does, in fact, look mighty promising.

The potential is certainly there, but that means very little if it isn’t harnessed correctly. So, we’ll await real-world benchmarks that are bound to surface the web in just a few days!

Only three desktop-class Alder Lake CPUs have been officially announced at this point so there’s still a whole lot coming our way at a later date. Fortunately, all three of these processors are geared towards the enthusiast segment of the market, so they’re more than worth taking a look at! The rest of the line-up will take center stage in Q1 2022, alongside Intel’s highly anticipated Alchemist GPUs!

Alder Lake CPUs | A Ton of Horsepower

Only the following three processors will be hitting the market on November 4th: i5-12600K/KF, i7-12700K/KF, and i9-12900K/KF. The nomenclature has remained the same which means the K variants offer overclocking with the KF ones shipping without an iGPU. That’s why they’re ever so slightly cheaper.

MSRPs, of course, mean very little at this point in time given the ongoing semiconductor shortages, but if we take them at face value, the cheapest CPU of the bunch will set you back for $264, with the most expensive one retailing for $589.

The lowest-end offering is obviously the most alluring one, and it’s no doubt going to allow Intel to compete with AMD on even footing. That especially holds true for the oft-rumored i5-12400, a processor that is expected to retail for around $200 (if not even less).

In any case, once the full line-up is revealed, Intel will have something to offer in every segment of the market, so definitely keep an eye out if these three particular CPUs are out of your price range!

Power In Numbers

The full 12th Gen Intel Core family will include a whopping 60 processors, all of which will be employed in more than 500 designs from a broad range of OEMs. This hybrid architecture will deliver scalable performance from just 9W to 125W. In other words, Alder Lake CPUs will power both thin-and-light notebooks and gaming behemoths alike, and they’ll share much of the same DNA as well.

How well they’ll perform throughout this range still remains to be seen, though. Intel’s hybrid core approach definitely warrants a bit of optimism, but we’ll reserve judgement until we see them in action.

Intel is promising huge performance gains across the board:

A Leap in Content Creation Performance: Advancements in multi-threaded performance, the responsive performance of the P-cores and the ability to move data at incredible speeds with DDR5 enable leadership across all types of content creation experiences, including:

— Up to 36% faster photo editing performance
— Up to 32% faster video editing performance
— Up to 37% faster 3D modeling performance
— Up to 100% faster multi-frame rendering

Still, these numbers (along with everything else that was unveiled) have not only been cherrypicked but are based on “picture-perfect” scenarios and set-ups. To truly harness the full potential of Alder Lake CPUs, you’ll need insanely fast DDR5 RAM alongside a sufficiently capable motherboard, one sporting a 600 series chipset.

And, well, neither of the two will be particularly affordable upon hitting the market. Whether it’s all worth it or not will heavily depend on your current set-up and the depth of your wallet. In any case, you’d be wise to wait things out a bit — we still don’t know how well these processors will perform “on the daily” and whether or not they’re really as efficient and powerful as Intel claims.

As always, we’ll be back with a lot more Alder Lake coverage over the coming days and weeks so stay tuned!