Efficiency cores for the win in this «Alder Lake» speed chip
Powered by two new microarchitectures, one designed for maximum performance and one for peak efficiency, Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs have been making some sizable waves in the desktop processor market. Core counts are once again shooting up, and the Core i7-12700K benefits from this and some key architectural improvements to run laps around its «Rocket Lake» predecessor. At its $409 price, however, the Core i7-12700K’s biggest competitor may actually turn out to be its more affordable Core i5 «K»-series sibling rather than any specific AMD Ryzen 5 or 7 CPU, or Rocket Lake. It’s a solid 12th Generation pick on Intel’s new platform, and a clear part of Team Blue’s desktop-silicon upswing as 2021 draws to a close. Just gauge whether you actually need the extra cores and threads, or the few-at-most extra game frames, before paying the premium over the Core i5-12600K. Core i7-12700K: The ‘Core’ Specs Before diving into this Core i7 review, we recommend that you first read our Core i9-12900K review if you’re new to the 12th Generation Alder Lake family. Intel’s 12th Generation Core architecture is a radical departure from its predecessors. In part, this is due to a number of changes to the platform, like the move to DDR5 RAM, but the most notable difference is the use of two distinctly different microarchitectures inside of the same processor: Performance Cores (P-Cores) and Efficiency Cores (E-Cores). We already covered these new core types in detail in the Core i9 review and won’t go into it all again here; instead, we will focus on what makes the Core i7-12700K its own unique product. The Core i7-12700K encompasses a dozen CPU cores. Most of the chip’s performance is derived from eight Hyper-Threaded P-Cores that are built on Intel’s «Golden Cove» architecture. Golden Cove is the direct successor to the «Cypress Cove» architecture found inside of 11th Generation Rocket Lake processors, and it was designed for high performance. Here, these cores are configured with a base clock of 3.6GHz, but they can hit speeds up to 5.0GHz (in isolated cases under Turbo Boost Max 3.0) or 4.9GHz (under regular turbo boost) right out of the box. The remaining four cores were created with Intel’s «Gracemont» architecture, which is a distant descendant of Intel’s low-power Atom processors. As such, the E-Cores were designed with energy efficiency in mind. They are clocked considerably lower, with a base frequency of 2.7GHz and a max turbo of 3.8GHz. Along with the cores, the processor also has 25MB of L3 cache baked in for the cores to share. This model also has Intel’s UHD Graphics 770 integrated graphics processor (IGP), which means you won’t need to buy a graphics card alongside this CPU in a system, unless you want to play games that aren’t several years old. Intel rates the chip to have a base power of 125 watts, with a maximum turbo power draw of 190 watts. The nearly identical Intel Core i7-12700KF processor is the same in every detail but lacks the IGP (or rather, likely has the IGP silicon permanently disabled). Its suggested retail price is $20 lower, and this no-graphics variant might be worth checking out if you intend to buy (or already own) a suitable graphics card. Testing the Core i7-12700K: Intel vs. Intel, Intel vs. AMD One direct impact of Intel introducing high- and low-power core architectures in the same processor is that the company now has a new way to differentiate its range of processors.
