Intel Core i5-12400F, 6C/12T, 2.50-4.40GHz, boxed

Der Tradition folgend, müsste der Core i5-12400 die rundeste CPU im neuen Portfolio sein. Aber Intel hat den Rotstift angesetzt, andere Lösungen sind plötzlich interessanter. Für nur 15 Euro mehr gibt es mit dem Core i5-12500 bis zu 500 MHz mehr Takt und eine bessere iGPU. Beide Modelle konkurrieren um den Platz an der Sonne.

Overall performance of the Core i5-12400F is very impressive thanks to the Golden Cove processor cores. Unlike the higher-end Alder Lake CPUs, the 12400F has no E-cores. The E-cores were introduced with Alder Lake by Intel to reach core count parity with AMD and offload less intensive workloads to these cores that are engineered to operate with higher energy efficiency at lower clocks and voltage. These E-cores let non-time critical workloads execute with reduced power impact, heat output, and battery drain (on mobile devices). The drawback is that it's not trivial for the processor to decide whether to schedule a program on the efficient E-cores or faster P-cores. While this logic generally works well, we found several cases of tasks getting scheduled on the wrong cores in our Core i9-12900K review, which caused serious performance implications. All this is no problem on the 12400F as it's more like a "classical" Intel CPU—there's only one type of core.