Another Alder Lake benchmark leak has appeared, this time with the 20-thread mobile Core i9-12900H. The chip was tested in Ashes of the Singularity on the lowest quality preset, making it difficult to compare results to other Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks. However, we now have a name for Intel's new 20-thread CPU that has appeared in leaks before.
The benchmark data shows the Core i9-12900H paired with an Nvidia RTX 3080 mobile GPU and 16GB of RAM. The benchmark ran at the minimum 1080P preset with an average of around 107 fps.
Take this benchmark data with a grain of salt, though. Alder Lake is still in early development, and given the low-quality preset, we don't have a good idea of how this CPU will perform in games. Additionally, the Alder Lake test systems used Windows 10 instead of Windows 11, which has a new scheduler optimized for Alder Lake.
The actual core count of the i9-12900H remains a mystery because Ashes of the Singularity can only detect the total thread count of the CPU. Presumably, if you factor in HyperThreading for the P cores, we're looking at a mix of six performance and eight efficiency cores. This core configuration is probably true as Intel has already confirmed that six performance cores and eight efficiency cores would be a core configuration for Alder Lake mobile.
Interestingly, we've seen a similar Alder Lake chip in previously leaked benchmarks. A few months ago, we saw a 14-core Alder Lake mobile CPU going toe-to-toe with AMD's Ryzen 7 5800H in GeekBench 5. Overall, the Intel chip was just 5% slower than its Zen 3 counterpart. Once the 12900H releases, we wouldn't be surprised to see the CPU surpass the 5% delta with the 5800H once all of Alder Lake's optimizations are in place.
Coincidentally, this Ashes benchmark comes out right after the M1 Max announcement and leaked benchmarks of the new chip. The new M1 Max is a powerhouse to reckon with, featuring a Geekbench 5 score of 1749 for the single-core and an impressive 11542 multi-threaded score.
For now, the leaked Geekbench 5 results for the Core i9 are not even close to the M1 max, with the i9 featuring a score of 1258 for single-core and just 6831 for multi-core. However, these tests are clearly with early silicon, but we'll keep an eye out for new benchmark submissions as the chips work past their early testing phases.
