Intel Core i7-6850K vs Intel Core i3-12100

Core i7-6850K vs Core i3-12100 specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Core i3-12100 beats the Core i7-6850K in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i7-6850K in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i7-6850K has significantly more cores with 6 cores compared to the Core i3-12100 that has 4 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i3-12100. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i7-6850K has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core i3-12100. Despite this, the Core i3-12100 has a slightly higher turbo speed. The Core i3-12100 outputs less heat than Core i7-6850K thanks to a significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Modern CPUs generally have more logical cores than physical cores, this means that each core is split into multiple virtual cores, improving efficiency for parallel workloads. Indeed, the Core i7-6850K has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.