Something is wrong with that result. It might be heavily overclocked.

The i9-12900K does 1893 / 17299 in more average results. Geekbench's site is down but several websites have large tables of the Geekbench V5 scores of all of the Alder Lake CPUs: https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-core-i9-12900k-is-12-faste...

But yes, the i9-12900K does outperform the 5950X I mentioned above.

Thanks for letting me know, I'm not sure why the numbers for the one I happened to click on are so far above the norm but I've now made an edit with a screenshot of more average numbers.

How can a stock clocked i9-12900K outperform M1 Ultra on single core?

It seems I have been misinformed about Intel.

> It seems I have been misinformed about Intel.

Intel's latest desktop parts are fantastic. They're the undisputed performance champions, the best value for gaming and consumer CPUs, and AMD has yet to catch up. The mid-level parts are even relatively power efficient (for desktop parts).

The pro-AMD anti-Intel commentary on the internet got completely out of control for a while. Intel is still very good at what they do, despite a few stumbles in recent history. It's just not fashionable to say good things about Intel right now.

The Intel i9-12900k has a TDP of something like 240 watts (I don't remember the exact number).

The AMD 5950x has a TDP of 105 watts.

The 5950x does roughly 10-15% worse single core and 10% worse all-core.

Intel is far behind AMD.

Overclock the 5950 a bit and you're back to where the i9 is stock, but still with less power. (I haven't actually done any research into that last sentence, but that seems plausible)

The AMD customer experience is also much better. I can upgrade - and soon will be upgrading - my 2 year old 3900x system to a 5950x. I don't have to buy a new motherboard like I would have had to with Intel. Plus my system has had PCIe 4.0 for a few years (which I have been utilizing with a super fast SSD) and also supports ECC RAM - Intel will price gouge you for those by making you go to their enterprise targeted CPUs/motherboards (to be fair, they do now support PCIe 4 on the i9).

Plus Intel withholding ECC from their consumer CPUs - even the high end ones - is just a major dick move and hurts all of the people like us on HN who want to have good hardware. And considering all the scummy anticompetitive stuff Intel has done over the last few decades, I'd say it's better to go with AMD even if their chips had a slight perf/$ disadvantage compared to Intel (but they don't). Of course, I'm not saying AMD is amazing and wouldn't do evil stuff if they got the opportunity, like Intel had, but AMD is still the underdog for just a bit longer, and in duopolies it's generally good to support the underdog if it doesn't cost you much (and here it doesn't really cost anything).

> The Intel i9-12900k has a TDP of something like 240 watts (I don't remember the exact number).

> The AMD 5950x has a TDP of 105 watts.

I have experience with both. The 5950X has significantly higher idle power consumption. It's a known downside of AMD parts. Unless you're running the CPUs at 100% all the time, the Intel platform will probably consume less power overall.

I know it defies all of the headlines and such, but it's true. Idle power consumption matters more than peak power consumption for most of us whose CPUs sit idle most of the time.

If power is a concern, you get the 12600K instead of the hot rodded 12900K.

> Overclock the 5950 a bit and you're back to where the i9 is stock, but still with less power. (I haven't actually done any research into that last sentence, but that seems plausible)

I can tell you haven't done any research because this isn't true. The 5950X doesn't overclock well at all. You can try to force higher all-core speeds with a lot of voltage, but it's going to become a power hungry monster of a CPU for very little gain.

The Intel really is the superior CPU.

> Plus Intel withholding ECC from their consumer CPUs - even the high end ones -

Also incorrect. Look up the 12900K page and scroll down to "ECC Memory Supported": https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/134599/...

This is what I was talking about when I said the pro-AMD anti-Intel rhetoric was out of control. It's like basic facts don't matter any more. People just want to hate Intel.

Interesting, thanks for the info. Unfortunately a bit too late to edit/delete my previous post.

The AMD parts are already running close to max. You can squeeze a few percent more out of them, overclocking like in the old days is out of the question.

If you set Intel and AMD to the same power limit Intel will probably be faster.

Intel just gave ECC back although you have to use a workstation chipset.

>It's just not fashionable to say good things about Intel right now.

Well, being single-handedly responsible for the nearly complete stagnation in processor performance for 10 out of the last 12 years probably has something to do with that.

That said, Intel's products and their performance are indeed quite underrated especially once you consider that they're being generated on a relatively old process node; it will be interesting to see what kind of performance they'll be able to wring out at 5 or 7nm.

Something to recognize is that tsmc’s 5nm can do 171M/mm2 where-as intel’s 7nm can do 200-259M/mm2.

M = millions of transitors

I’ve always assumed that Intels terrible corporate culture was responsible for that stagnation (told to me by former Intel employees). What upset me was the pointlessness of having their employees suffer that culture and then the rest of the world suffer the lack of progress.

...that and the lack of any real competition

Nothing focusses the mind like a real competitor.

It would be interesting to see how x86 fares against ARM on the same node size.

>The pro-AMD anti-Intel commentary on the internet got completely out of control for a while.

Not really. It was entirely justified, but things have changed. Prior to Alder Lake Intel really was just plain worse than AMD in most respects.

Processor vendors have leapfrogged each other many, many times before. A new architecture is supposed to beat everything else on the market. Recent years have been weird because Intel bungled 10nm at about the same time AMD bungled Bulldozer. We are getting back to normal.

It is clocked 1.6x higher than M1 chips (single-core), but also the CPU architecture isn't from 2015 like Intel's desktop chips were from generation 6 through 10.

A single core at that 5.2GHz turbo can consume ~40W alone, however.

A single 12900K core achieves that score using as much power as all 10 M1 cores combined.

Because Golden Cove is just better than Firestorm.

Geekbench doesn't load ATM. Are these numbers legit (both for the 5950X and 12900K)? Does Intel really outperform AMD single-core by 62%? Sniff test says that's way too much, but what do I know. I also doubt the multi-core difference. Yes, the 12900K seems to be a well performing CPU, but then again 5950X is a 16 "P" core part...

Intel has always had a huge lead over AMD on single core. AMD did manage to compete on multi core with the Zen chips but still hasn't gotten close on single core

I don't know why you're being downvoted. What you're saying is, in my experience, true. AMD is the multi core king. Intel is the single core king.

Multi core CPU performance benchmarks push your CPU and all its cores to the limit, but that doesn't reflect the typical real-world use case because the typical real-world use case involves programs that aren't able to effectively utilize all CPU cores. On top of that, gaming is the only typical use case where you are going to be pushing your CPU to the limit (i.e. the place where you actually need your CPU to be fast) and games don't CPU-parallelize well, meaning higher single core performance is generally best in the case of gaming.

Macs aren't made for gaming. They're made for productivity, multitasking, and creative work (the one major area where a multi core CPU can be fully utilized) so it makes complete sense for Apple to go the multi core route, but I can't say the same for AMD and their 8+ core gaming CPUs.

Intel had a dwindling lead in single core perf over the past few years, but when AMD came out with Zen 3, AMD actually had a non negligible lead over Intel. But Intel is now winning again with the 12th gen chips. So they are trading blows these days.

Gotcha. Is the cost efficiency comparable as well? Could I buy an AMD gaming CPU with similar single core performance to an Intel gaming CPU for about the same price?

I believe, this is result from overclocked system.