Dominant Core i9-12900KS confirms Intel hybrid architecture experiment success as it adds to Alder Lake's single-thread chart supremacy on PassMark

Alder Lake has been a great success for Intel, with Team Blue dabbling in the dark arts of hybrid architecture to add some much-needed sparkle to its CPU offerings. The company’s 12th Gen parts have consistently impressed in synthetic benchmarks and gaming tests, and they have provided an exciting stopgap while enthusiasts wait to see what AMD can produce with Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 chips. The Intel Core i9-12900KS has already appeared on one notorious benchmark, but now it has turned up on the slightly more reliable PassMark site, and it has soared to the top of the single-thread chart.

With 4,411 points (based on two samples, so high margin for error), the i9-12900KS has added +4.6% to the score managed by the also powerful i9-12900KF. In terms of Intel’s dominance over this particular chart, the Alder Lake i9-12900KS’s current score is +13.1% ahead of its nearest rival from Apple (M1 Ultra) and +25.99% ahead of the now-aging AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Single-thread/core supremacy has frequently been a go-to achievement for Intel with each CPU generation, and Alder Lake has been no different. The 16-core, 24-thread i9-12900KS utilized a typical TDP of 150 W with a TDP up hitting 241 W (MTP: Maximum Turbo Power).

Of course, it is worth remembering how specific this “event” is. A win in single-thread performance for a CPU is akin to a sprinter winning the 100 m race at the Olympics – they are the fastest but not the greatest overall. The winners of the decathlon and heptathlon events are often considered the greatest athletes, and the same can be applied to chip comparison. While the i9-12900KS blows away the competition in single-thread with its super-fast Performance core peak rate (5.50 GHz), its overall CPU Mark is 47,649 points, which is only a paltry +3.11% above the Zen 3 Ryzen 9 5950X from 2020. The latter benchmark requires exceptional performances over nine tests to result in a high score and lofty chart position.

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