Intel's Alder Lake chips can hit 330W when overclocked, just like their Comet Lake daddies

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According to leaks, the upcoming 12th Gen Intel chip may be a rather performant beastie.

Intel Alder Lake chip render over gradient background
(Image credit: Intel)

Overlocked Intel Alder Lake CPUs are going to be power-hungry, if recent benchmark leaks are anything to go by, though it might not be as bad as you think. 

Twitter leaker 9550pro—who posted a CPU-Z benchmark of the apparent retail version of the upcoming 12th Gen chip—claims its full-on power consumption may reach heights of 330W.

For context, its actually a tiny fraction less than that of some older CPUs, such as the Intel Core i9 10900K CPU which sucks 331W when overclocked to 5.3GHz. This is a 10-core CPU, mind you, while the Intel Core i9 12900K is a 16-core processor, with eight Performance Cores and eight Efficient Cores, thanks to the hybrid Alder Lake architecture.

So, while 330W may sound like a fair whack, compared to previous generations we're still looking at a pretty substantial increase in efficiency on a per-core basis.

Intel has decided to slip some new high-efficiency cores into its Alder Lake architecture. Adding efficiency cores into the design should help with some of the heavy lifting, and these are way more exciting for PC gaming than you might think.

Anyway, these apparent Alder Lake overclock benchmark scores see the new chip's eight Golden Cove performance cores (P-cores) running at 5.2GHz, and eight Gracemont efficiency cores (E-cores) at 3.7GHz, as an update to the original Twitter post confirms.

(Image credit: 9550pro on Twitter)
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If these benchmarks are anything to go by, we're looking at 27% more single-thread performance than the 16-core, 32-thread AMD Ryzen 9 5950X used here as reference.

That's a CPU-Z score of 851 over the Ryzen's 648, as well as a multithread score of 11,986.9, compared to the 11,906 of the 5950X. Not bad at all, so long as we're looking at the real deal, and not some hoax meant to get us all excited.

Of course, take leaks like these with a grain of salt, but if it all works out we could be looking at some powerful, efficient capabilities from these nippy new 10nm CPUs. Although not entirely without the high power demands of processors' past.

Katie Wickens
Katie Wickens
Hardware Writer

Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she's waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.