Intel Core i7-12700 Put to the Test: Is Alder Lake Really Faster Than Rocket Lake?

Intel Core i7-12700 Put to the Test: Is Alder Lake Really Faster Than Rocket Lake?

Intel Core i7-12700 Put to the Test

The benchmarks of an alleged eight-core Intel Core i7-12700 processor (codenamed "Alder Lake") have appeared in the database of the popular Geekbench 5 program from Primate Labs and, if the results prove true, it could become part of the our guide to the best CPUs on the market.

Credit: Intel Apparently, the Intel Core i7-12700 “Alder Lake” processor has eight high-performance (P) cores, an unknown number of high-efficiency cores power (E) (which can be disabled on this unit) and can execute up to 16 threads with a clock ranging from 2.10 GHz to 4.80 GHz. The absence of E cores and / or the number of threads indicated could result from configuration read errors, as the Core i7-12700K is expected to be equipped with eight P cores, four E cores, and 20 threads. Before observing the results, we would like to point out that Geekbench 5's single-core and multi-core scores are strongly influenced by cryptography, which has a very high weight in the final overall score. Additionally, this workload benefits from AVX-512 acceleration, which is supported on Rocket Lake but not Alder Lake.

Compared to the Intel Core i7-11700 "Rocket Lake" processor, the i7-12700 it has better performance on single thread operations on both integer and floating point numbers when running at a very similar frequency. We can attribute this to the microarchitecture benefits of the new Golden Cove core over Cypress Cove or the significantly larger L3 cache. The multi-core scores of the i7-12700 are higher than those of the Core i7-11700, perhaps because the new CPU has a brand new scheduler called Thread Director.

Credit: geekinco In general, the Intel Core i7-12700 “Alder Lake” processor seems to work quite well in Geekbench 5 if the cryptographic results are not taken into account. Finally, it should be noted that these results were obtained with a chip in pre-production, so the final model could also differ substantially.