Intel Core i5 Alder Lake i5-12600K OEM (CM8071504555227)

Hybrid processor from the Alder Lake family

Against the backdrop of the heyday of AMD and the success of Ryzen processors, Intel engineers had a hard time - revolutions were canceled for too long and the technical process did not change. But in 2021, the ice broke - Intel presented Alder Lake hybrid processors inspired by mobile single-chip systems. The essence of the revolution is this: instead of the classic scheme with identical cores, new Intel chips use a hybrid bundle of computing and energy-efficient cores. The former are involved in serious computational tasks, the latter work in the wings when solving simple background tasks. Many experts called the announcement of Alder Lake the main technical breakthrough of the company over the past 10 years.

Efficient energy consumption

The Core 5-12600K processor has an unlocked multiplier and in our opinion is the best option for games from the entire Alder Lake series. It is equipped with 6 performance and 4 energy efficient cores that operate in the frequency range from 3.7 GHz to 4.9 GHz. All this is seasoned with 20 MB of third-level cache, support for fourth and fifth generation PCI-E buses, as well as the ability to work with DDR4 and DDR5 memory. Compared to the previous generation of Core i5, the new products have increased the maximum power (150 W), but at the same time the overall level of power consumption has decreased.

Support for DDR5 memory and PCI-E 4.0/5.0 interface

In multi-core tests and real work under high load, the Core i5-12600K shows plus or minus the same results as the popular 6-core Ryzen 5 5600X chip. In most applications and games, the difference in performance does not exceed 10%, occasionally it can grow up to 30% and almost always this is due to the peculiarities of the new architecture. For example, the energy-efficient cores of the Core i5-12600K do not support AVX512 instructions, which is why the operating system has to brutally equalize the performance of P and E-cores, which does not always have a good effect on the overall performance of the computer. In some scenarios, the overall performance of the cores is more important than the number of cores. However, we have already seen this story at the dawn of multithreading and automatic overclocking. At first, these were also things for growth, which many users preferred to turn off.