It remains to be seen whether Intel's forthcoming 12th Generation Alder Lake chips can hang with the best CPUs on the market. In the meantime, hardware detective Benchleaks has dug up two benchmark results that give us a sneak peek of what the Core i9-12900K can do in After Effects.
The Core i9-12900K is the flagship processor for the Alder Lake lineup. As we've already seen from previous leaks, the Core i9-12900K flaunts eight Golden Cove cores and eight Gracemont cores, bringing the total number of cores to 16. Remember that only the Golden Cove cores have Hyper-Threading. The chip comes with a 30MB L3 cache and an unlocked multiplier for overclocking. The early engineering samples of the Core i9-12900K emerged with a 5.3 GHz dual-core boost and 5 GHz all-core boost on the Golden Cove cores and a 3.9 GHz quad-core boost and 3.7 GHz all-core boost on the Gracemont cores. The Core i9-12900K is rumored to feature a 125W PL1 and 228W PL2.
On the other side of the ring, we have the Core i9-11900K, which is the current flagship and the highest-end part of the 11th Generation Rocket Lake lineup. The Core i9-11900K wields eight Cypress Cove cores with Hyper-Threading and a mere 16MB L3 cache. It sports a 3.5 GHz base clock and 5.3 GHz boost clock. The octa-core chip has a 125W PL1 and 250W PL2.
The Core i9-12900K system was based on Asus' ROG Strix Z690-E Gaming WiFi motherboard with a GeForce RTX 3090 and what appears to be 64GB (2x32GB) of DDR5-4800 memory. One aspect to take into consideration is that the system was on Windows 10 Pro with the May 2021 update, which potentially impacted the Core i9-12900K's performance.
Hybrid processors don't play nice with Window 10's scheduler. Windows 11, however, brings an improved scheduled with better support for heterogeneous chips. In fact, Intel recently detailed how Alder Lake works more efficiently on Windows 11 given the harmony between its Thread Director technology and the next-generation scheduler.
The Core i9-11900K system, on the other hand, consisted of the ROG Maximus XIII Hero, GeForce RTX 3090, but was limited to 64GB (2x32GB) of DDR4-2133 memory. It was utilizing the same Windows 10 Pro operating system with the May 2021 update.
Core i9-12900K vs. Core i9-11900K
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Core i9-12900K | Core i9-12900K | Core i9-11900K |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall Score | 1,575 | 1,573 | 1,548 |
| GPU Score | 156.5 | 156.7 | 160.9 |
| RAM Preview Score | 137.9 | 138 | 130.1 |
| Render Score | 137.7 | 137.2 | 123.6 |
| Tracking Score | 196.9 | 196.7 | 210.7 |
The Core i9-12900K scored 1,573 and 1,575 points in the PugetBench After Effects benchmark, meanwhile the best submission for the Core i9-11900K was 1,548 points. However, it wouldn't be an apples-to-apples comparison if we only look at the final score. The Core i9-12900K had the advantage of DDR5 memory, while the Core i9-11900K clearly had a faster GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card.
If we look at the scores individually, the Core i9-12900K put up a 11% higher render score than the Core i9-11900K. However, the Core i9-11900K beat the Core i9-12900K by 7% in the tracking score.
Sadly, the PugetBench submissions don't reveal the complete specifications for the memory. Nonetheless, it was evident that DDR5 had the upperhand. The Core i9-12900K had a 6% higher RAM preview score than the Core i9-11900K.
Intel will finally launch Alder Lake this Fall 2021. Leading-edge technology is never cheap, though. Alder Lake adopters will have to invest in a completely new platform, consisting of a LGA1700 motherboard with the 600-series chipset and DDR5 memory.
