The 8 "Golden Cove" performance cores (P-cores) present on 12th Gen "Alder Lake-S" desktop processors offer an IPC gain of 19% over the "Cypress Cove" cores powering current 11th Gen "Rocket Lake-S" processors, claims Intel. This would put them at roughly 35% higher IPC than the "Skylake" cores that powered Intel client desktop processors until as recently as 2020, with the 10th Gen "Comet Lake." This 19% number, however, is presented as a geomean of performance improvement at iso-frequency, across a wide selection of tests that include SPEC CPU 2017, SYSmark 25, Crossmark, PCMark 10, WebXPRT3, and Geekbench 5.4.1.

The high IPC of the P-cores, coupled with the high rumored frequencies for the enthusiast i9-12900K part running well into 5.30 GHz or beyond, begins to explain how 8 of these "Golden Cove" cores, coupled with 8 fairly fast "Gracemont" cores, closes in on the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 5950X at Cinebench R20.