Leaked Benchmark Suggest i9-12900K is One Smoking Hot Beast
Load test, most likely involving the new i9-12900K CPU from the Alder Lake-S generation, have been leaked. It was very warm and a lot of power was used.
Intel i9-12900K will be the flagship model of the upcoming Alder Lake-S generation. Its 16 cores and hybrid design (8 performance cores and 8 economy cores) should provide huge swaths of performance and high flexibility at the same time. Weibo published the results of tests, in which this chip probably took part. What is certain, that the test subject achieved very high temperatures, and the power consumption of the processor reached 250W.
The author of the entry is one of the employees of the Chinese branch of Lenovo. According to WCCFTech, he is a gaming desktop and product planning manager. The main role in the tests was played by a RTX 3090 GPU, but the attention of Internet users was drawn to the processor. Judging from the screenshots, it has 16 cores / 24 threads (the number of HWinfo readings and the position of the task manager window indicate this), so it's most likely a Core i9-12900K.
Screen with test results published by a Lenovo employee. Source: Weibo
In the tests that lasted about an hour the chip heated up to 93 degrees Celsius. The average power consumption was 248.8 W (according to Intel in case of a TDP of 125 W, the PL2 stage power consumption should not exceed 250 W). We have to admit that this is quite a lot and it's hard to imagine that it could be any other processor than the 12th-gen flagship. However, before we start lamenting about Intel's new gaming "stoves", I'd like to point out that much of the data has been blurred. We do not know the clocking - after all, the processor could be overclocked - and we also know nothing about its cooling.
So it's not worth prejudging anything. We won't know anything about Alder Lake-S CPUs until after they're available for purchase (and the first reviews), which won't be until later this year. The Thread Director feature will take advantage of the new processors' flexibility, but it may require Windows 11 to run, which will be distributed in computer sets in a similar timeframe.
