It hasn’t been released yet, it won’t until the first part of 2022, but similar to what happened with the Core i5-12400F, the The Core i3-12100 is already finished on the first test platform. XFastest site got a engineering samples of the new entry-level processor based on the architecture Alder Lake and put it to work in different workloads.
The Core i3-12100 is a CPU with 4 cores and 8 threadsso unlike the Alder Lake “K” processors announced so far, it does not have a dual architecture but is based on only one type of core, the “Golden Cove” P-core. As we’ve explained in the past, for the desktop industry, Intel has packed it two days from which to obtain the full range: the first is an 8P+8E die, the second a 6P+0E. And the Core i3 is based on the latter.
As with the other specs in this sample, the cores have a base clock of 3.3 GHz and can speed up to 4.3GHz in single-core Turbo Boost. On board the processor we find 5 MB of L2 cache and 12 MB of L3 cache, flanked by an integrated UHD 730 GPU. The base power of the processor is equal to 60Wwhile the maximum power of the turbo increases to 77W (here the explanation of these terms which at Intel replace the TDP).
Core i3-12100 was tested on an ASRock Z690 Steel Legend with 16GB of DDR4-3600 memory and a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU, comparing it to CPUs AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X on an ASRock X470 Taichi with the same memory and video card.
The tests show higher performance than AMD processor based on Zen 2 architecture. For example, in Cinebench R23 we see the 12100 score 1649 points in single-core and 8474 points in multi-core versus 1280/6723 in AMD’s 3300X. We see a similar scenario in the PugetBench test for Premiere Pro.
In games, all three CPUs achieve the same fps in Cyberpunk 2077 without DLSS and RT, but with those enabled, the Core i3-12100 takes some leeway. XFastest also tested Counter-Strike Global Offensive at high 4K settings, recording 256fps with Intel’s engineering sample and 236fps with the 3300X.
In terms of temperatures and consumption, the data recorded with certain AIDA64 tests highlight a processor that should consume little energy and heat up relatively little. In this news we have published only some of the tests performed on the engineering sample, for other tests see the article on Faster.