Intel isn’t giving up their top end pricing but with their performance improvement managing to claw them back to a decent position. This was evident with the Core i5-11400 seemingly enough to present a valid option versus the venerable Ryzen 5 3600.
Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake-S Core i5-12400 will seemingly lack the high-efficiency Gracemont cores that higher-tier SKUs will have but it will have the entire set of features that comes as basic with Alder Lake-S CPUs such as DDR5 support, PCI-e Gen4 and all other I/O.
The Core i5-11400 is offering a good replacement for the Ryzen 5 3600 which sees itself at $220. Without a GPU, the Core i5-11400 is providing a more flexible option. This will seemingly continue with the Core i5-12400 but with a more noticeable improvement, as a Chinese user has shared some early benchmarks showing the Core i5-12400 scoring higher than the $300 Ryzen 5 5600X which currently enjoys as the choice gaming CPUs for mainstream PCs.
The leaked benchmarks shows the Core i5-12400 scoring 659 points in single-threaded mode in Cinebench R20 and a multi-threaded score of 4784 points. This puts it by a few points ahead of the 5600X which may be the reason why AMD is rushing its V-cache upgrade for Zen3+ instead of going with a full Zen4 release.
