TIE: Intel Core i9-12900K wins for Windows 11 users, AMD Ryzen 9 5950X wins for cost-conscious content creators

Yes, competition is good, but only because it pushes AMD to be even better than if they did not have at all. That's the only part I care about.I can respect your opinion, but I disagree. In my opinion companies all do what they can to stay as profitable as they can. Consumer "goodwill" is just another currency these large multinational companies spend and receive for various conduct. AMD currently has a decent amount of goodwill, however, they spent a major chunk of it by not releasing a 5600, 5300, 5700 / 5800 while also increasing prices by 50 dollars across the board. They did this for money and they knew they could get away with it because they had garnered enough consumer goodwill. Which means I don't give my money to those companies that do NOT: in this case, intel and nvidia. At least not until they prove they are atoning for all the s * they did up until now and start to do better. But if they never change and keep doing s *, then it's a no from me. It's as simple as that and I don't see a problem with this whatsoever. I may be in a minority thinking like this, but I know I'm not the only one. Intel's chips are competitively priced, but PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 are also significant cost-adders for motherboards. All signs point to DDR5 kits being expensive in the early days, so it's good that some motherboards support the more affordable DDR4. The CPU is rated at 65 W base power and 202 Watt maximum Turbo power. It is manufactured in 10nm, called Intel 7, process at Intel.Alder Lake chips expose up to 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and an additional four lanes of PCIe 4.0 from the chip for M.2 storage.Those lanes are split into x16 or x8 for GPUs, or x4/x4 for storage slots. PCIe AICs (Add-In Cards) that support PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs (which don't exist yet) are already in the works.

Intel's Thread Director technology is the quiet star of the Alder Lake show. This technology works by feeding the Windows 11 operating system with low-level telemetry data collected from within the processor itself, thus informing the scheduler about the state of the cores, be it power, thermal, or otherwise, and the type of workload being executed by any given thread. The Windows scheduler then uses this additional information to make real-time intelligent decisions about thread placement. Here we can see that the effect of Windows 11 and Thread Director on the Intel Core i9-12900K's benchmark results. In some cases it was within the margin of error, but it did also correct for the issues we saw in HandBrake and POV-Ray during the Windows 10 test set. Moving to Windows 11 also adds a not-insignificant boost to the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere test runs (using the Puget Systems PugetBench test utilities), which showcases usage scenarios more along the lines of what Intel says Thread Director was made to handle. For content creators, the cost proposition of 12th Gen perks up, thanks to several outright wins that prove Intel's 16 cores are, in select cases, just as capable in performance as AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X. But on cost of adoption, the percentages are still skewed in AMD's favor for many PC builders and upgraders. That aspect, and that AMD chips will play just about any game that works on your chosen version of Windows...not whatever gets patched on Windows 11 on a game-by-game basis. Any game, almost any OS. We didn't think that would be a point in the "Pros" column for any processor launched in 2021, but Intel's first major foray into desktop big.LITTLE seems not without its own initial complications. Processors that support 64-bit computing on Intel® architecture require an Intel 64 architecture-enabled BIOS. The Thread Director (in hardware) can support the operating system to decide which thread to use on the performance or efficiency cores for the best performance.

Intel® AES New Instructions

All models support: SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2, FMA3, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST), Intel 64, XD bit (an NX bit implementation), Intel VT-x, Intel VT-d, Hyper-threading, Turbo Boost 3.0 (2.0 for embedded), AES-NI, Smart Cache, Thread Director, DL Boost, GNA 3.0, and Optanememory.

All models support: SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2, FMA3, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST), Intel 64, XD bit (an NX bit implementation), Intel VT-x, Intel VT-d, Hyper-threading, Turbo Boost 3.0, Thermal Velocity Boost, AES-NI, Smart Cache, Thread Director, DL Boost, GNA 3.0 Conversely, Alder Lake is incredibly impressive in Windows 11 and takes the lead over AMD in gaming and performance in most types of workloads. Overall, the Core i5-12600K is now the best gaming CPU on the market, while the Core i9-12900K slots in as the best high-end processor for mainstream platforms. The P-cores and E-cores are at the heart of 12th Generation Core's new "big.LITTLE"-style architecture. This approach to chip design employs high-power and low-power processing cores. In this particular chip, the design pairs eight P-cores with eight E-cores, and divides the demands of your PC across them from moment to moment, depending on the task at hand. Only the eight P-cores are Hyper-Threaded in this new chip design, for two threads per core; that's why the number of supported threads isn't the usual double the number of cores. In our more limited run of benchmarks on Windows 11 we did find that, in certain circumstances, Thread Director provided a sizable benefit. Sometimes the difference was negligible (for example, Cinebench R23, POV-Ray, and gaming tests all stayed roughly the same), while in others like the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere runs, we saw an improvement of nearly 30% in both benchmarks. Whether that means it's 30% faster in Windows 11 or 30% slower in Windows 10 is all a matter of your vantage point. Intel's new chip puts a teraflop in your desktop. Here's what that means". PopSci. June 1, 2017 . Retrieved June 2, 2017.I rather buy an inferior product than step over my principles and dignity and s*** up to those 2 companies and give them my money for a minority performance advantage (at a point in time). Nvidia is actually worse than intel, but intel is bad enough still. If you want the "world's best gaming processor" today—as in a desktop processor that just plays any PC game you want—you might want to wait and see how the DRM situation shakes out on Alder Lake. But the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X remains a cost-conscious, fuss-free option that kept its station in gaming in Windows 10.

For example, outright thread-punisher tests like Cinebench R23 or 7-Zip will simply max out every resource handed to them, Thread Director or not. This is why we see such similar results between the two whether they're run on Windows 10 or 11, because Thread Director can't be of much help when the only direction on the board is "Give 'er everything she's got." Meanwhile, the Photoshop and Premiere Pro benchmarks designed by Puget Systems involve many different task types—file retrieval, storage, image rendering, editing operations, and the like—that are run in sequence. This gives Thread Director "something to do," as it were, sidelining resources when the load of the run is lighter, and then redistributing them when it's time to render or edit. The result is a clear improvement in the overall score, and at face value, it suggests that you could save a reasonable amount of time working in an Adobe program on a Windows 11-based Intel Core i9-12900K machine, versus on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, or on a Core i9-12900K running on Windows 10. TIE: Intel Core i9-12900K wins on new features and added flexibility, AMD Ryzen 9 5950X wins on cost of adoptionIntel's new single-threaded Efficiency (E) core comes with the Gracemont microarchitecture to improve multi-threaded performance and provide exceptional area efficiency (small footprint) and performance-per-watt. Four small cores fit in roughly the same area as a Skylake core and deliver 80% more performance in threaded work (at the same power). A single E core also delivers 40% more performance than a single-threaded Skylake core (at the same power) in single-threaded work (caveats apply to both).