https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/intels-alder-lake-big-little-cpu-design-tested-its-a-barn-burner/ > After spending several days with Intel's newest consumer CPU designs, we have some surprising news: they're faster than AMD's latest Ryzens on both single-threaded and most multithreaded benchmarks. > We suspect this will be especially surprising to some, since Intel's newest desktop CPUs feature a hybrid "big.little" design similar to those found in ARM CPUs. AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950x is a traditional 16 core, 32 thread design, with all cores being "big" high performance types with symmetric multithreading (SMT, also known as "hyperthreading"). By contrast, the i9-12900K offers 16 cores and only 24 threads—with eight "performance" cores featuring SMT, and eight lower-performance "efficiency" cores with no SMT.