Competitive Intel Core i7-12700 targets AMD Ryzen 9 5900X performance levels at a likely much cheaper price tag

More Intel options are heading the way of PC builders who want to stick to a strict budget. The non-K Alder Lake SKUs have started leaking out again, with the Intel Core i7-12700 leading the Geekbench charge. A new record of this CPU, shared by APISAK, shows the 12-core, 20-thread hybrid part racking up 1,768 points in the single-core bench and 13,843 points in the multi-core tests. These scores are a considerable improvement over those recorded a few months ago by an engineering sample. Clock speeds went from base 2.1 GHz to turbo 4.8 GHz, and the Alder Lake chip was joined by an ASRock Z690 Taichi board and 32 GB RAM.

Unsurprisingly, the multi-core results for the Intel Core i7-12700 are way beyond those of the predecessor i7-11700, which is down to the four extra cores that the Alder Lake chip can utilize. The 8-core Rocket Lake part manages 1,624 points and 8,800 points in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. This leaves the i7-12700 at +8.87% single and +57.31% multi (theoretical maximum vs. chart average scores) over its predecessor, with those extra cores offering an additional selling point for the 12th Gen chip.

The Intel Core i7-12700 also manages to keep pace with the rival 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X. The Geekbench charts list 1,669 points (single) and 14,058 points (multi) for the Zen 3 chip, leaving Intel +5.93% up in the single-core discipline and AMD just 1.55% up in the multi-core test. It has been speculated that the i7-12700 could be priced at around US$350, with the i7-11700 originally having an MSRP of US$323. With the Ryzen 9 5900X selling at over US$500, the Alder Lake processor should have a valuable price-performance advantage.

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