The new 12th generation Intel CPUs are official and increasingly resemble those of smartphones, with which they share part of the basic philosophy
During the Intel Innovation event, the Santa Clara giant made official the new Alder Lake family CPUs, i.e. 12th generation. Six new processors have been made official, including the Intel Core i9-12900K that has been announced as the best processor currently available in the world for high-performance gaming.
The latter has frightening numbers: it can go in Turbo Boost to the monstrous frequency of 5.2 GHz if the context requires it, and has 16 cores and 24 threads, so in fact it is the best choice ever for those who demand maximum performance in gaming and content creators, who perhaps often have to do with video editing. Intel's new CPU family will include 60 processors, which are expected to support more than 500 partner designs, from ultrabooks (super lightweight laptops) to ultra high-end desktop PCs, the company has already announced.
Intel ever closer to the philosophy of smartphones
All six new CPUs, from the Core i9 mentioned above to the "small" Core i5-12600K are made with a 10-nanometer manufacturing process, so on paper, in addition to power, should also ensure good energy efficiency, and have a hybrid architecture style big.LITTLE architecture like the one used in smartphones, that is to say that it places side by side some cores for the heaviest workloads - therefore with high power - and others with high efficiency, in order to consume as little as possible when possible.
It's the same philosophy that guides Qualcomm, MediaTek and the others during the development of chips for smartphones, and to which a year ago Apple converted with its M1 chips for Mac that it develops in house (and that it has also evolved in M1 Pro and M1 Max). Even Intel then, indirectly, admits that this is the way to follow, and demonstrates it by marrying a system similar to the big.LITTLE architecture.
Intel has carried out tests to assess the effectiveness of the new hybrid architecture (called Intel 7) before the presentation of CPUs, and has worked hard to improve performance and compatibility, since now developers will be asked to design or adapt existing applications optimizing them for the new architecture.
In the new CPUs, then, there's a new section called "Thread Director" that does nothing but sort the computational requests coming from applications and the operating system: lighter tasks are sent to high-efficiency cores, more demanding ones to high-power cores. All this, says Intel, will work better on Windows 11, which was born optimized for this architecture.
"The best gaming chip in the world"
To be noted, among the many technical innovations of the new Intel CPU 12 Gen, the transition to DDR5 RAM, whose increased bandwidth availability will provide additional power to be used in photo and video editing. Below is a statement from Gregory Bryant, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Client Computing Group:
"The high-performance hybrid architecture of Intel's 12th generation Core processors is an architectural shift made possible by close co-engineering of software and hardware that will deliver new levels of performance for generations. Leadership begins with the arrival of our flagship Core i9-12900K - the world's best gaming processor - and you'll see even more incredible experiences as we ship the rest of the twelfth-generation family and beyond."