Intel Core i9-12900K Alder Lake CPU sells for more than $1,000 in China
According to hardware bloggers YuuKi_AnS, Who has posted relevant pictures and inside information Intel’s Sapphire Rapids, Chinese merchant secretly sells qualified samples (QS) of Intel Core i9-12900K Alder Lake Chinese processors. The current asking price is between US$1,064.95 and US$1,157.55.
Although Intel has not confirmed the exact date for Alder Lake’s launch, there are rumors that unless there is any setback, heterogeneous processors will be available in late 2021 or early 2022. In addition, the latest news regarding the sale of qualified samples in the Chinese market indicates that we can see retail supply before the end of the year.
This Core i9-12900K It has 16 cores, including eight Golden Cove cores and eight Gracemont cores. The flagship Alder Lake chip also has 30MB of L3 cache for its use. It is a K series SKU, so Core i9-12900K will provide an unlock multiplier for overclocking. However, Alder Lake’s hybrid design will definitely complicate the overclocking process, because consumers may want to overclock large and small cores.
The essence of Alder Lake’s existence is to provide better power efficiency. Core i9-12900K is rated at 125W PL1 and 228W PL2.The processor has the same PL1 level as the existing processor Core i9-11900K (Rocket Lake), but PL2 is 8.8% lower.Before Lake Alder leaks, We see that Golden Cove is said to provide up to 20% single-threaded high performance, although the PowerPoint slides never mentioned the Intel microarchitecture used before for comparison.
The engineering sample (ES) of the Core i9-12900K has a 5.3 GHz dual-core boost clock and a 5 GHz full-core boost clock on the Golden Cove core. As for the Gracemont cores, they run with a 3.9 GHz quad-core boost clock and a 3.7 GHz full-core boost clock. It is safe to assume that qualification samples can increase the clock speed.
Obviously, anonymous sellers are only willing to sell qualified samples of Old Lake in bulk-100 pieces is the minimum order. However, it also includes older engineering samples. However, as YuuKi_AnS said, distributors do not want to sell Alder Lake motherboards.As Alder Lake ordered a new LGA1700 socket, You can’t really put the chip on any existing motherboard.
Even at $1,000, the price of the Core i9-12900K is ridiculous. Of course, you have to pay a premium to buy unreleased processors. Still, if you can’t even get a working motherboard, no one will pay more than $1,000 for a chip.
