The previous trickle of Alder Lake leaks has quickly turned into a torrent of information on alleged benchmarks, specs, and now pricing as of today. It's another case where the usual suspects leak information, and all we can say is that Alder Lake sounds expensive. The potential advantage of this latest leak is that it suggests confidence in Intel that the radically new technology will truly be successful and will have the performance to support its price.
Twitter filter @momomo_us revealed an image of a full priced retail product page for the Alder Lake family. This was probably a staging view, as there are placeholder images as well. Interestingly, prices for all high-performance Alder Lake CPUs along with SKUs are displayed in USD.
The most obvious conclusion from this image is that Alder Lake will be more expensive than previous generations of Intel CPUs. The last-gen 11900K was priced at $ 550, while the 12900K costs up to $ 705. As for the i7, it's priced at $ 495, 25% more than the MSRP of the previous-gen equivalent. However, it may be inappropriate to compare Alder Lake to previous generation Rocket Lake equivalents, as the products will be very different in specs and performance. If anything, Alder Lake's top SKUs seem more in line to compete with AMD's high-end offerings.
Getting what you pay for?
Alder Lake will feature a mix of large and small cores to significantly increase performance per watt and multi-threaded performance, in addition to multiple other technological advancements. The upcoming 12900K will use 10nm Golden Cove cores and essentially a dual core count with the introduction of small, efficient Gracemont cores for background tasks. This will result in eight large cores and eight small cores, all of which will be controlled by an integrated Thread Director to take full advantage of the available performance.
With all of this in mind, you might be willing to pay those extra bucks to have a CPU that can fully handle high-update games, plus things like background recording apps and even live streams all at once. However, these are just our current estimates of Alder Lake's performance.
Of course, in addition to rising CPU prices, motherboards and RAM are likely to be expensive as well, as Intel will be the first to introduce PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support. With all this in mind, it makes sense that Alder Lake is a bit cheaper than the MSRPs of the Ryzen 5000 series. However, the latest CPUs from AMD can already be found. with great discount at online retailers, so competition is sure to increase in the coming months. Alder Lake will have to compete with any CPU AMD releases V-Cache packed in 3D next year. At the very least, the competition between the two should be interesting.
Please note that all prices are in USD.
