THE CROWN for making the world’s fastest gaming chip may ultimately be a hollow one, but Intel and AMD take it seriously. AMD’s Zen architecture may give Intel a hard time in many areas, but that final accolade never quite falls into its grasp—and Intel is keen to make sure it doesn’t. When AMD’s cacheheavy Ryzen 7 5800X3D was announced, you knew Intel would answer back. It has, with the Special Edition Core i9-12900KS: a chip that only really exists to break records.
It’s a classic Intel response that we’ve seen before: take an existing chip, carefully ‘bin’ it (essentially use quality control testing to pick only the most robust silicon), and you have a new halo processor, without producing any new silicon.