Intel Core i9-10900K vs Intel Core i7-12700

Core i9-10900K vs Core i7-12700 specs and performance

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Core i7-12700 performs better than the Core i9-10900K. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i9-10900K in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i7-12700 has slightly more cores with 12 cores compared to the Core i9-10900K that has 10 cores. But they both have the same number of threads. Our comparison shows that the Core i9-10900K has a slightly higher clock speed compared to the Core i7-12700. Also, the Core i9-10900K has a slightly higher turbo speed. The Core i7-12700 outputs less heat than Core i9-10900K thanks to a significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

The more cores a CPU has, the better the overall performance will be in parallel workloads such as multitasking. Many CPUs have more threads than cores, this means that each physical core is split into multiple logical cores, making them more efficient. Indeed, the Core i9-10900K has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.