Intel Alder Lake-S sample crashes and burns on UserBenchmark with a 0.8 GHz clock and puny bench but AMD fans shouldn't celebrate just yet

An Alder Lake-S sample has been found on UserBenchmark recording some interesting results. APISAK shared the benchmark run, which shows the upcoming 12th Gen Intel processor pretty much crashing and burning on a highly controversial site that has been frequently accused of heavy bias in favor of Intel parts. But the story here isn’t UserBenchmark’s reputation; it’s the appearance of the 10nm hybrid part from Intel and how poorly it seems to perform while tested in a Dell Precision 3660 desktop PC that matters here.

Of course, there are a couple of potential reasons why the Alder Lake-S processor would throw up such poor results on a “probably” pro-Intel benchmark. The first obvious reason is that it will be an early engineering sample that still requires a lot of tweaking and refining, so it’s not going to do an Intel Core i7-11375H and screech right to the top of UserBenchmark’s 1-core charts on a single sample run. But 0.8 GHz for a 12th Gen chip and a 1-core score of 27.6 points contributing to 24.9% bench and 1,251st rank (out of 1,288 places) is still a lousy showing.

The evidence of this being an Alder Lake chip also likely explains the poor run, though. The device number 90670 has already been associated with Alder Lake-S (with 906a0 for Alder Lake-P and 906a1 for Alder Lake-M), and the CPU configuration of 16 cores and 24 threads really gives the game away. It's probable that this Alder Lake-S sample's performance is simply being misread by UserBenchmark, in the same way Geekbench has measured 12th Gen Intel chips with astonishingly high clock rates, with the eight Hyper-Threading-enabled Golden Cove cores and eight single-thread-capable Gracemont cores apparently causing more headaches for synthetic benchmarks.

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