With its hybrid design and support for the latest technologies, Alder Lake is shaping up to be one of the most interesting releases in recent memory. And the leaked benchmarks of the Core i9 12900K have it bringing the fight to AMD in a way that few could have hoped for. Still, we need to have Intel's 12th-gen desktop chips in our hands before we're ready to pass judgment on it. Something that may happen a bit sooner than many expected.
According to MSI, and a bit of sleuthing over on Videocardz, Alder Lake looks set to land on November 4.
This date was revealed thanks to a free upgrade kit for MSI's all-in-one CoreLiquid R and Core Liquid K coolers that will support the new, larger socket Alder Lake's CPUs use. Alder Lake uses the new LGA1700 socket for its chip, and while it has felt like Intel has switched sockets a bit too easily in the past, for once this feels justified—Alder Lake supports DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, and that support needs to be plumbed in somewhere.
That aforementioned sleuthing by Videocardz goes on to suggest that the full Alder Lake announcement will happen the week before on October 27 and that preorders will also be accepted on that date. With the sales and reviews of Alder Lake, aka Intel's 12th-gen desktop CPUs, happening on November 4.
Adding credence to these dates is the fact that Intel's Innovation event takes place on October 27–28, and it has been widely expected that Alder Lake will be the star of that particular virtual show, so it all seems to make sense.
There's no word of when we'll see the new Z690 motherboards land, or if we'll see specific DDR5 memory kits launch with Alder Lake in mind, although you'd assume that this would all happen at the same time. There's no point having a chip if you've got nothing to plug it into.
So far we've seen early sales and benchmarks of the Core i9 12900K, and this 8P+8E chip is expected to be joined by the Core i7 12700K (8P+4E) and the Core i5 12600K (6P+4E). Where those Ps stand for 'Performance' cores and the Es for 'Efficient' ones, by the way, showing off the hybrid nature of Intel's new family.
If these rumors are right, then that means we'll find out a lot more about Alder Lake in exactly a month's time.
