Rumor: Intel Alder Lake CPU prices leak for beginning lineup and are hiked up

The previous trickle of Alder Lake leaks has rapidly grown into a raging torrent of information about supposed benchmarks, specs, and now prices as of today. It’s another case of the usual suspects leaking information, and all we can say is that Alder Lake sounds pricey. The potential upside to this latest leak is that it suggests confidence at Intel that the radically new tech will indeed be successful and have the performance to back up its price tag.

Twitter leaker @momomo_us revealed an image of a retailer product page with complete Alder Lake family pricing. This was likely a staging view since there are also placeholder images. Interestingly enough, the prices for all of the high performance Alder Lake CPUs along with SKUs are all on display in USD.

The most obvious takeaway from this image is that Alder Lake will be more expensive than previous generations of Intel CPUs. Last generation’s 11900K was priced at $550, whereas the 12900K is up to $705. Looking at the i7, it’s priced at $495, up 25% from the MSRP of the previous generation equivalent. It’s perhaps inappropriate to compare Alder Lake to the previous generation’s Rocket Lake equivalents though, as the products will be vastly different in specs and performance. If anything, the Alder Lake’s top SKUs look more in line to compete with AMD’s high end offerings.

(Image credit: @momomo_us on Twitter).

Getting what you pay for?

Alder Lake will feature a mix of big and little cores to increase performance per watt and multi-threaded performance significantly, in addition to multiple other technology advancements. The upcoming 12900K will use the 10nm Golden Cove cores and essentially double core count with the introduction of the small and efficient Gracemont cores for background tasks. This will result in eight big cores, and eight little cores, all of which will be controlled by an integrated Thread Director to make the best use of available performance.

With all of this in mind, you might be willing to pay those extra bucks to have a CPU that can fully handle high refresh gaming in addition to things like background recording apps and even livestreaming all at once. These are just our current estimates of Alder Lake’s performance though.

Of course, in addition to the increased prices for the CPUs, motherboards and RAM are likely to be expensive as well since Intel will be the first to introduce PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support. With all of this in mind, it makes sense that Alder Lake is slightly cheaper than the MSRPs of the Ryzen 5000 Series. However, AMD’s latest CPUs can already be found on heavy discount at online retailers, so the competition is sure to heat up in the coming months. Alder Lake will then need to compete with whatever CPUs AMD releases with 3D packaged V-Cache next year. At the least, the competition between the two should be interesting.

Please note that all prices are in USD.