A benchmark for an engineering sample of Intel's future 10nm Alder Lake-S processors seems to show the new processor big.LITTLE already outperforming an i9-9900K processor. Several benchmark results for the next-generation Intel processor, due to arrive in late 2021, have already surfaced online, including one showing that it supports DDR5 RAM. This shows that the base frequency of the processor reaches 2.2 GHz, which is the highest we've seen since Alder Lake-S in terms of base frequency. The test result for the 12th Gen processor was taken from Geekbench 4.4 and as Videocardz points out, it might have had trouble discerning the new processor architecture as it clocks in at a boost frequency of 27,2 GHz, which obviously it's some kind of bug (but hello if only Intel had that kind of surprise up its sleeve). With a combination of eight high-performance "Golden Cove" cores and eight "Gracemont" efficiency cores, it is not known from which type of core the base frequency was read, but it was probably a reading from a Gracemont heart. With a base frequency of 2.2 GHz, that would be significantly lower than an Intel i9-9900K, which has a base frequency of 3.6 GHz and a single core type. Look at the actual GeekBench 4.4 performance score though, and Alder Lake-S actually beats the i9-9900K in single-core performance by just under 100 points (6436-6340) and beats it in multi-core performance ( 47870 to 35500). ), so it's almost certain GeekBench was reading from an efficiency core when timing the processor's base frequency. However, much is still unknown about the tested engineering sample. We've seen a few different CPU frequencies for Alder Lake-S, so it's not clear if this is a completely different class of CPU, or if it's a more mature revision of those earlier versions. Still, the new benchmark seems to confirm that Alder Lake-S will support DDR5 RAM and we already know that it will support PCIe 5.0. AMD's current generation of Ryzen processors isn't here yet, though AMD has said that its Zen 4 5nm architecture, scheduled for 2022, supports DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.