Intel Core i9-12900K & ASRock Z690 Phantom Gaming 4 spotted, 2K points in Cinebench R23 teased

Intel Core i9-12900K & ASRock Z690 Phantom Gaming 4

A new entry featuring Intel’s flagship Alder Lake-S CPU, Core i9-12900K, has been discovered in the SiSoftware Sandra benchmark database by APISAK.

Thunderobot products

According to the Sisoftware entry, the CPU is offering an 8C+8c configuration, which refers to the hybrid architecture featuring Performance and Efficient cores. However, the reported thread count of 32T is obviously wrong, as Efficient (small) cores do not support hyperthreading. The CPU is listed with “4.88 GHz/5.2 GHz, 3.6 GHz/4.7 GHz IMC” clock speeds, which might refer to the boost clock of each type of core in this heterogeneous design.

The Core i9-12900K was tested using ASRock Z690 Phantom Gaming 4 motherboard, which apparently was installed in a ThundeRobot system. This is a Chinese system integrator offering both desktop and mobile gaming solutions.

The performance is not really that great, with a multi-media score of 1414 Mpix/s it is clearly lower than AMD Ryzen 9 5950X which scores around 2000 Mpix/s. This is either because the CPU was not fully utilizing its frequency (reported at 4.88 GHz) while the CPU should feature 5.3 GHz Thermal Velocity Boost for up to 2 cores. APISAK also speculates that the small cores could have been disabled.

Intel Core i9-12900K in SiSoftware Sandra, Via: @TUM_APISAK

Intel Core i9-12900K in Cinebench R23: 205X points

There is also a leak from HXL, who posted mysterious screenshots from Cinebench R20 and R23. Just two days ago we had a leak featuring Core i9-12900K with 30K+ multi-core in Cinebench R23, but so far no one has posted proof that the CPU would also score 2000 points in the single-core test.

Alleged Intel Core i9-12900K in Cinebench R20/R23, Via: @9550pro

Should this screenshot indeed be demonstrating the real performance of the 12900K, then this CPU would offer the highest single-core performance out of all known desktop CPUs. In comparison to AMD Ryzen 9 5950X at stock settings, we are looking at a 21% performance advantage of Alder Lake over AMD Zen3 and Intel Rocket Lake architectures, or alternatively 40%+ over Core i9-10900K (Comet Lake-S).

Since Cinebench R23 software is relatively new, it has not been used in Ryzen 5000 series reviews when it came out. However, ComputerBase has a community-based ranking featuring nearly all popular processors:

Cinebench R23 Single-Core ranking, Source: ComputerBase

Source: Sisoftware via @TUM_APISAK, @9550pro