12th Gen Intel Celeron Matches 11th Gen Intel Core i9 Performance: But There Is A Catch

Intel at CES 2022 announced the entry-level and mid-range 12th Gen Intel CPUs, which include the latest iteration of Celeron G6900, the most affordable current-gen CPU. With a recommended customer price of between $42.00 and $52 or around Rs. 3,500 is a great CPU choice for entry-level PC builds for normal day-to-day usage.

Specs-wise, the Intel Celeron G6900 is a dual-core processor with no hyperthreading support. The CPU has two P-cores or performance cores based on golden clove architecture and has a base clock speed of 3.4GHz. It supports all the latest technologies like DDR5 and PCIe Gen5 just like the expensive Intel Core i9-12900K.

Excellent Single-Core Performer

On Geekbench 5, the Intel Celeron G6900 posted a whopping 1397 points and on the multi-core CPU test, it scored 2565. When compared to CPUs like the Intel Core i9-11900K or even the Ryzen 9 5950X, the single-core performance of the Celeron G6900 is on par with the flagship CPUs. However, due to the lower number of cores, the multi-core performance is nowhere near those CPUs.

These numbers indicate that the Intel Celeron G6900 can be a great CPU for budget PC builds. However, if your workload involves a lot of multitasking, then we recommend you to get a CPU with at least four cores, especially in this day and age. The higher single-core performance of the Celeron G6900 also indicates that you can game on this CPU, at least at 1080p without any issue.

Again do note that to get a performance like this you might have to pair the CPU with a good motherboard and high-speed RAM, which in itself could cost a lot more than the Intel Celeron G6900. If you want a bit more performance, you can consider the Intel Pentium Gold, which is also a dual-core CPU but supports hyperthreading.

It is interesting to see that Intel hasn't cut down the features on the entry-level 12th Gen Intel CPUs. This ensures that all the processors from the 12th Gen Intel family of CPUs will offer similar core-to-core performance and the high-end models offer better multi-tasking due to higher clock speed and more CPU cores.

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