Core i7-12700 'Alder Lake' Geekbenched: Faster Than Rocket Lake

Benchmarks of an alleged eight-core Intel Core i7-12700 'Alder Lake' processor have been added to Primate Labs' Geekbench 5 database. The new chip could join the list of the best CPUs when it becomes available later this year, but if these results are any indication, it already demonstrates some promising results.

If Geekbench 5's readings are accurate, then Intel's Core i7-12700 'Alder Lake' processor has eight high-performance (P) cores, an unknown number of energy-efficient (E) cores (which may be disabled on this unit), and can execute up to 16 threads while operating at 2.10 GHz ~ 4.80 GHz. The absence of E cores and/or the number of supporting threads might be a misreading since the unlocked Core i7-12700K is rumored to feature eight P cores, four E cores, and 20 threads. Either that, or Intel intends to offer a very differentiated products family. 

Before we proceed to the results, there is an important thing to note about Geekbench 5 and its single-core and multi-core scores. Both scores are heavily impacted by cryptography, and while cryptography performance is important, the benchmark gives this aspect of performance an unfairly high weight in the final overall score, something that the developer of the benchmark has admitted. Additionally, this segment of the workload responds exceedingly well to AVX-512 acceleration, which is supported on Rocket Lake but not on Alder Lake. That magnifies the impact of the already-existing disparity of the unfair weighting. 

To that end, it does not make a lot of sense to compare the overall Geekbench 5 results with Intel's Alder Lake processors without AVX-512 support against CPUs that support it. Instead, it makes more sense to compare the integer and float benchmark results to figure out what to expect from the upcoming CPUs.

When compared to Intel's Core i7-11700 'Rocket Lake' processor, the i7-12700 has higher single-thread integer and floating-point performance when working at a very similar frequency. We can attribute this to either the microarchitectural advantages that the new Golden Cove core has over the Cypress Cove core or to the considerably larger L3 cache. Meanwhile, Apple's M1 remains the single-threaded champion. 

The i7-12700's multi-core scores are higher than the Core i7-11700, perhaps because the new CPU has an all-new Thread Director scheduler. Perhaps this is also why Alder Lake beats Apple's M1 in multi-threaded workloads.  

While we included performance numbers for AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X and Intel's Core i7-11700K processors in our table, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to compare what should be a 65W processor to chips that have a TDP that exceeds 100W and can consume even more when they essentially overclock themselves. 

In general, Intel's Core i7-12700 'Alder Lake' processor seems to perform quite well in Geekbench 5 if we filter the cryptography results out of the equation. Meanwhile, since we are dealing with leaked results obtained on pre-production hardware, take them with a grain of salt.