There are only two players when it comes to Computer Processor Industry. These two players are AMD and Intel. Every year Intel and AMD come up with new processors which are faster, more powerful, and more efficient.
Intel has been the king of the market for a long time, but in the last couple of years, it has not been able to perform that well as AMD gave it tough competition. They had problems in manufacturing chips on 10 nm technology. They were not fast enough. But now they are trying to catch up. With the release of their 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs, they are trying to make a comeback.
Previously Intel used to have uniform cores but now they have changed their approach and there are two types of cores. P cores and E cores, P stands for Performance, and E stands for Efficiency. Performance cores are aimed at single-threaded high-performance applications while efficiency cores are aimed at lightweight multithreaded tasks.
They have released a series of new processors as they do every year. Let’s look at some of the good processors released this year.
Intel Core i9 12900k – This comes with 16 cores and 24 threads. It has 8 P-cores and 8 E-cores, the performance cores are single-threaded and the efficiency cores are hyperthreaded. Base clocks are 3.2GHz (P-core) | 2.4GHz (E-core). The Boost Clocks are 5.1GHz (P-core) | 3.9GHz (E-core). It is overclockable and it also supports DDR5 RAM.
Intel Core i7 12700k – This comes with 12 cores and 20 threads. It has 8 P-cores and 4 E-cores. Base Clocks are 3.60GHz (P-core) | 2.70GHz (E-core). The Boost Clocks are 4.90GHz (P-core) | 3.80GHz (E-core). It is also overclockable and supports DDR5 RAM.
Intel Core i5 12600K – This comes with 10 cores and 16 threads. It has 6 P-cores and 4 E-cores. Base Clocks are 3.7GHz (P-core) | 2.8GHz (E-core). The Boost Clocks are 4.9GHz (P-core) | 3.6GHz (E-core). It is also overclockable and supports DDR5 RAM.
Intel Core i3 12300 – This comes with 4 cores and 8 threads. It has 4 P-cores and 0 E-cores. The Base Clock is 3.5GHz. The Boost Clock is 4.4GHz. This is the only processor among the four that does not support overclocking but it as with others it also supports DDR5 RAM.
K as the suffix in the names of these processors informs about the overclocking capabilities of these processors. If there is K in the name then it is overclockable and vice-versa.
With the 12th gen came a couple of new things. This is the first time we have seen Intel come up with performance and efficiency cores. Also, DDR5 ram compatibility and PCIe 5.0 got introduced by Intel in this gen itself.
