5.5 GHz Core i9-12900KS is Intel’s fastest—and most power-hungry—desktop CPU

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Not to be outdone by the upcoming release of AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Intel is placing one more Alder Lake desktop CPU at the top of its 12th-generation Core desktop lineup. The Core i9-12900KS (the "S" is for "special edition") is a 16-core, 24-thread chip (eight P-cores and eight E-cores) with a rated top speed of 5.5 GHz, 300 MHz faster than the existing i9-12900K.

But as with many of the high-end Alder Lake chips, Intel is bumping up power usage in the interest of wringing a bit more performance out of its processors. The chip's base power-roughly the amount of power it will consume when running at full tilt with Intel's stock limits in place-is 150 W, up from 125 W for the i9-12900K.

We've explored this issue in some depth in our reviews of the Core i7-12700 and Apple's Mac Studio. All the P- and E-cores in Intel's CPUs are great at handling labor-intensive rendering and video encoding tests that use all your cores at once, but to get their best performance, you need to let them consume a lot more power (and generate more heat) than competitors from AMD or Apple. And for tasks like gaming, where single-threaded CPU performance is more important, it's cheaper and more efficient to go for a chip with fewer cores, like Intel's own Core i5-12400 or the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

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