INTEL CORE i5 12600K

This impressive bit of hardware shows how a little architecture can make a big difference. By Jacob Ridley

The humble Core i5 is the CPU that matters most for gamers. It’s cheaper than a Core i7 or Core i9, but it still offers the fundamentals of what makes those chips great for gaming. With the Core i5 12600K that’s no different, though that may be understating what this chip can really do.

That’s because the Core i5 12600K isn’t the modest

CPU you expect: it’s the equivalent of the top previous-gen chip in a package that’s almost half the price, at around $520.

That means it only took one generation, and less than 12 months, for Intel to take its

Core i9 performance and deliver it inside a far cheaper Core i5 package. Since it’s not pushing to the very limit of what Alder Lake can deliver in a single die, either, it’s also a more power savvy design than the Core i9 12900K. That makes for a more well-rounded processor for mid- to high-end builds.

The Core i5 12600K really is shockingly good, and the deeper you dive into this chip’s performance, the more you realise it’s the real star of the 12th Gen show.

DEEP DIVE

To understand why the Core i5 12600K is so impressive, you have to first know how it’s pieced together. That’s because there’s something fundamentally different about Alder Lake to all chips that came before it: it’s a hybrid. That means it comes with two different types of processing cores: Performance cores (P-cores) and Efficient cores (E-cores).

What this means is there are two different architectures powering most 12th Gen processors: Golden Cove and Gracemont. The Golden Cove architecture aims to be something close to your traditional CPU core, built to excel at single-threaded performance and deliver high clock speeds. These are the P-cores. The Gracemont architecture is something Alder Lake borrows from the Atom lineup of low-power chips. These are built to be power-efficient, and you can fit more of them onto a chip without taking up too much space. These are the E-cores.

That’s dramatically underselling both architectures’ intricacies, but it helps explain the Core i5 12600K’s obscure specs. This chip comes with six P-cores and four E-cores, in what’s known as a 6+4 design. That makes for a slight increase in overall core count over its predecessor, the Core i5 11600K, and more physical cores than even a Core i9 11900K.

I’ll admit I wasn’t always sure about these Efficient cores. Chip designer Arm has been rolling out big.LITTLE designs for a while to great success, but targeting the mobile market where power efficiency equates to longer battery life. Intel intends to bring Alder Lake to mobile, too, so I get that angle, but on the desktop side of things, what is a cluster of small cores built out of Intel’s next-gen Atom architecture going to deliver to a PC gamer like me?

I should’ve known it wasn’t all about raw numbers, clock speeds, and single-threaded performance, however. Intel’s Efficient Cores are much more than you might first imagine. For starters, these cores help increase the multi-threaded performance, as you’ve simply got more cores to throw at a problem. Then, there’s the ability to remove load from the P-cores in a pinch, which is really where these low-power cores come in handy for gaming. Say you’re a streamer and you’re trying to play a competitive title on one screen and beam your capture off to the world on the other. An Alder Lake CPU, with a little help from Windows 11, should be able to divvy up this workload in order to keep your P-cores focused on delivering gaming framerates and your E-cores on streaming over the web.

Therein lies some of Alder Lake’s magic, but there’s more to getting all of these architectures working together than simply placing them all on one chip. A large part of Intel’s Alder Lake performance comes from utilising these two different cores in an effective manner. To do that it uses something called the Thread Director. This helps your OS decide which tasks should go to which cores, by handing your OS more information than it would otherwise have available to it.

Now, granted, a processor with a straight 16-cores, such as the Ryzen 9 5950X, is able to manage multiple workloads just too, but Alder Lake does have a few more tricks up its sleeve.

The most significant is DDR5. For a long while we’ve been happily plodding along with DDR4-powered machines, and these have started to hit incredible speeds, but times are a-changin’. DDR5 is already setting the bar higher for memory frequencies and performance, and Alder Lake is ready to meet it.

DDR5 kits do, however, come with generally higher price tags than DDR4. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of a