I think it is safe to say that the 12900K will be beating the 5950X in single and light threaded workloads and also beating it (or at the very least matching it) in heavily multithreaded workloads. Don’t forget there is also plenty of room for these scores to improve with final silicon, final microcode, final clock speeds and Windows 11 scheduler. And you also get PCIe5, DDR5, iGPU/Quicksync, etc. As for pricing I think they will opt to go for a $50 price hike over the price of their current mainstream flagship (11900K, $539-$549) so I expect it to be priced $589-$599. Of course, it is entirely possible to price it $799 (if they compare it versus the 5950X and show that the 12900K beats it) or even $979 (if they compare it against the 10980XE and show that the 12900K beats it), but I don’t think they will go that route. They want positive coverage and there is no better coverage from the media than when you beat your competition in every metric while also massively undercutting them in price.
The Scores for their 5950X are low.
No. First of all, you say the scores are low yet the screenshot you give is comparing apples to oranges. The scores you show in the screenshot are not the scores the article is using (which are the individual sub-scores). Second, your example benchmark (which is
this one) is a 5950X that uses PBO (or is overclocked) and is also heavily tuned in terms of RAM/IF frequency and timings . What Tom’s hardware used (which is
this one) is kind of a median example for 5950X performance. It still uses overclocked RAM/XMP, good cooling but no PBO/overclocking.