Intel is still a few months away from unleashing its next-gen 12th Gen Core CPUs with the new Alder Lake-S platform coming in October 2021 according to the latest reports -- with qualifying samples leaking out onto the CPU black market for $1064.
The new Intel Core i9-12900K processor can be purchased for anywhere between $1064 and $1157 on the "Chinese black market". VideoCardz reports that it has confirmed these Core i9-12900K processors are indeed Qualification Samples and the major reason why sellers wouldn't want to post pictures of their super-secret CPUs.
The new Intel Core i9-12900K QS processor clocks in at up to 5.3GHz on its big cores and 3.7GHz on the small cores, with power limits of 125W for PL2 and up to 228W for PL2. Inside, the new Core i9-12900K will have 8 high-performance Golden Cove cores and 8 high-efficiency Gracemont mini cores.
- Read more: Intel's next-gen Alder Lake-K could launch with Windows 11 in October
- Read more: Intel 12th Gen Core 'Alder Lake-S' launch in November: PCIe 5.0 + DDR5
16 cores in total, but then add Hyper-Threading on top of that and we have 24 threads in total for the Core i9-12900K processor. The new Intel Core i9-12700K changes things up a little with 8+4 cores with HT adding up to 20 threads, while the Core i5-12600K having 6+4 cores + HT for 16 threads in total.
We should expect much more news in August-September leading into the October 2021 launch of Intel's new 12th Gen Core CPUs.