It’s Sunday again, meaning it’s time for us to round up our winners and losers from the last week in tech.
This week, Intel released it’s 12th Generation range of desktop processors, with one chip in particular catching our eyes. Meanwhile, we received some bad news from Japan as another Nintendo Switch shortage set it’s sights on Christmas.
Winner: Intel
Intel launched its new range of 12th Gen processors this week, including the “world’s best gaming processor” (Intel’s words, not ours): the i9-12900K.
The i9-12900K is built using the 12th Gen Alder Lake architecture with a new hybrid design. This combines two different types of cores – Performance cores and Efficient cores – improving the processor’s ability to take on multiple tasks at once.
There are also more cores packed into the i9-12900K for a total of 16 (8 of each type), along with support for DDR5 RAM and PCIe 5.0 to future-proof the CPU and offer performance boosts all around.
Computing and Gaming Editor Ryan Jones awarded the i9-12900K four and a half out of five stars in our review, making it an obvious choice for our winner this week.
“The Intel Core i9-12900K is an outstanding high-end CPU, with Intel offering typically high single-core speeds while also seeing a major boost to multi-threaded workloads to challenge AMD’s Ryzen range”, wrote Ryan in our review.
“Top it off with superb future-proofing by way of PCIe 5.0 and DDR5, and you have a fantastic chip that offers excellent jack-of-all-trades performance”.
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Loser: Nintendo
This week’s loser is Nintendo after reports rolled in suggesting we’re in for another Switch shortage this Christmas.
According to a report by Japanese site Nikkei, Nintendo is scaling back production of all versions of the Switch due to the lack of semiconductors and “other electronic parts” available.
The shortage is set to impact 1 in 5 of the planned 30 million units originally planned to ship this year, reducing Nintendo’s production by 20%. It’ll affect all versions of the handheld console, including the Switch, the Switch Lite and the new Switch OLED.
“We are assessing their impact on our production”, a Nintendo spokesperson told Nikkei in the report.
As far as losers go, struggling to keep up demand for your console isn’t the worst position to be in. After all, it’s been four years since the Switch first debuted and Nintendo has continued to release and sell out of new versions of the console over its short lifetime.
However, with the PS5 still near-impossible to get your hands on, the impending Switch shortage could spell trouble for parents (or really anyone looking to treat themselves to a new console) this Christmas.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.