Intel's presentation frequently focused on the gaming performance of the Core i9 12900K under Windows and that it's the "world's best gaming processor". We'll see next week how it performs for Linux gaming.

At least under Windows, the Core i9 12900K generally outperforms the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and is a big upgrade over the Core i9 11900K.

Besides gaming, Intel also focused in on the content creation workloads under Windows where the Core i9 12900K performs very strongly.

There are overclocking improvements with Alder Lake, including on the software side with Intel's Windows-based Extreme Tuning Utility. Intel has not provided any overclocking support under Linux so those wanting to push their Intel CPUs faster will need to continue managing their overclock controls from the UEFI setup area.

Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors will be available to pre-order beginning today while the retail availability will begin on 4 November at which point the review embargo will also expire. Stay tuned for my Linux testing then; it may be a bit limited on the 4th itself due to a delay in Intel sending over the Alder Lake hardware, but will be testing it thoroughly over the next week and many follow-up articles over the weeks to come. If anyone has any special Linux test requests or questions, be sure to post in the forums or on Twitter. At least from my close monitoring of all the Alder Lake Linux enablement work over the past year and longer, all key functionality should be in place and ready to go for a good open-source experience on launch day. One of the main open questions is around Intel Thread Director efficiency on Linux, but my benchmarks will be able to shed light on that shortly.