A benchmark of Intel's Alder Lake top-of-the-line Core i9 12900K chip has leaked from Twitter leaker OneRaichu. This is just one benchmark, but if this performance is demonstrated in all other benchmarks, it suggests that Intel could take back the performance crown from AMD. And that too, by some margin.

There is a lot of information packed into this tweet, but at least the chip is not overclocked. Also, both the single-threaded and multi-threaded performance numbers are astounding and much higher than the usual generational improvements.

Raichu later tweeted that the S in the original tweet was a typo and was just a standard certified sample of the Core i9 12900K. He also stated that power consumption could be well over 200W to achieve full turbo frequency

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Still, a brief comparison with the results of our own testing of current Intel and AMD chips shows why this could be such a big issue. Single-threaded performance alone is a huge leap from the previous generation, and multi-threaded performance is also astounding, and is where AMD had the biggest lead.

The Core i9 12900K gave an 18% performance advantage over the Ryzen 9 5950X, which also has 16 cores. However, the Alder Lake chip actually runs fewer threads. Its 16 cores consist of eight Golden Cove cores with HyperThreading and eight Gracemont cores without HT, for a total of 24 threads. AMD's flagship Ryzen, on the other hand, has 16 Zen 3 cores with simultaneous multi-threading capability, for 32 threads of processing power.

But the important statistic for us PC gamers, however, would be the single-thread count that this rumor presents: approximately 22% higher than AMD's Zen 3 chip, giving Alder Lake a significant lead in every gaming performance metric it tries to throw at Potential.

Of course, we don't know what the rest of the system used for testing looks like, and that could have a significant impact on performance, but if these numbers are true, they paint an impressive picture of what Intel has in store for Alder Lake.

The bigger caveat is whether this will translate to more applications and games, and that all depends on the hardware scheduler that Intel and Microsoft have been working on together. how Windows will recognize these different classes of cores How it recognizes them and how well it can assign critical workloads to the more powerful options is going to be key.

Given that unreleased QS samples of the Core i9 12900K are also available in China, it seems inevitable that we will see more and more benchmark leaks. If it really is this good, Intel may have a hard time silencing the rumors.