A few hours ago, AMD showed a demo of its new Ryzen 7 5800X3D beating the Core i9-12900K slightly in a few gaming benchmarks, but Intel obviously has its response ready. During Intel's CES 2022 keynote, Gregory Bryant demoed the company's unreleased Core i9-12900KS that it says will hit 5.5 GHz on a single core right out of the box. Additionally, it will sustain more than 5GHz during multi-core workloads, which Intel demoed during a Hitman 3 gaming session.
The demo comes on the heels of Intel's teaser tweet earlier this week, and the chip is already in production as Intel readies it for release "to OEM customers" later this quarter. The "S" suffix stands for Special Edition, denoting that this is a limited-run CPU that's binned for the ultimate performance possible. Intel's Core i9-9900KS was the last Special Edition chip, hitting 5.0 GHz on all cores, but it arrived back in 2019.
Intel is obviously upping the ante here with a 5.5 GHz boost on a single core, along with the ability to hit 5.2 GHz on all cores during gaming workloads.
Intel conducted a real-time demo of the chip with the HWInfo monitoring utility open to show the clock rates for all eight P-cores and eight E-Cores. Below we can see the P-cores operating at 5.2 GHz while the E-cores run at 4.0 GHz.
Unfortunately, we didn't see the apparently elusive 5.5 GHz during the demo.
Intel didn't share any other details, like the type of cooling required or pricing. Bryant did say the chip will ship to OEM customers this quarter, which leaves some questions as to whether or not this chip will come to retail outlets. We'll follow up as we learn more.
