To keep up with the upcoming release of AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Intel is placing another Alder Lake desktop processor at the top of its 12th generation Core desktop lineup. The Core i9-12900KS (“S”stands for “Special Edition”) is a 16-core processor with 24 threads (eight P-cores and eight E-cores) with a rated maximum speed of 5.5GHz, which is 300MHz faster. than the existing i9-12900K.
But, as is the case with many high-end Alder Lake chips, Intel is ramping up power consumption to squeeze a bit more performance out of its processors. The chip’s base power – about as much power as it would draw when running at full power with Intel’s factory limits – is 150W, compared to the i9-12900K’s 125W.
We covered this in detail in our Core i7-12700 and Apple’s Mac Studio reviews. All of the P- and E-cores in Intel processors are great for time-consuming rendering and video encoding tests that use all of your cores at the same time, but for the best performance you need to let them consume a lot more power (and generate more heat) than the competition from AMD or Apple. And for tasks like gaming where single-threaded performance is more important, it’s cheaper and more efficient to use a chip with fewer cores, such as Intel’s own Core i5-12400 or Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
The i9-12900KS will go on sale April 5 for $739. Existing motherboards may require a BIOS update to support the new chip.