New flagship Intel Alder Lake CPU trumps AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

Intel’s Alder Lake Core i9-12900KS has made its way into the wild early, and leaked benchmarks suggest it outperforms AMD’s Zen 3 flagship offering. Shared on Reddit by Seby9123 and highlighted by Tom’s Hardware, the CPU boasts max boost clock speeds up to 5.5Ghz, while its performance and efficiency cores can reach respective speeds of 5.2GHz and 4.0GHz.

According to the leaked Cinebench results, the Core i9-12900KS achieves 2,162 in single-core tests and 29,164 points in multi-core. Not only does this put it ahead of its predecessor, the i9-12900K, but it also runs rings around AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X chip. This isn’t exactly surprising, especially since Intel’s new flagship is designed to compete with the upcoming Ryzen 7 5800X3D. However, the fact it’s seemingly 29.6% faster than the 5950X boosts its chances of becoming the next best gaming CPU.

Seby’s early tests also include CPU-Z data, which confirms that the chip has a TDP of 150W – a 25W increase over the i9-12900K. While this change in power consumption isn’t drastic, it could put extra strain on your power supply if paired with an Nvidia next-gen graphics card, especially since the GeForce RTX 4090 apparently guzzles 600W.

Intel’s claim to the CPU thone isn’t secure just yet, but AMD’s current offerings are struggling to keep up. Recent benchmarks suggest that the company’s Ryzen 9 6900HX mobile chip is up to 32% slower than its i9-12900H rival, giving the blue team an edge within the gaming laptop market. That said, AMD says its next-gen Ryzen 7 5800X3D will be “the world’s fastest” CPU, so Intel might be in for a rude awakening once it arrives on the scene.