Intel's 12th-Gen Alder Lake chip will bring the company's hybrid architecture, which combines a mix of larger high-performance cores paired with smaller high-efficiency cores, to desktop x86 PCs for the first time. Intel has shared many of the architectural details at its Architecture Day 2021, but left out the key details, like pricing and specific models. As per usual, most of the information, including pricing, chip configurations, and benchmarks, has leaked through retailer postings and benchmark utilities with online databases. We'll cover all of those details below. Alder Lake represents a massive strategic shift as Intel looks to regain the uncontested performance lead against AMD's Ryzen 5000 series processors. AMD's Zen 3 architecture has taken the lead in our Best CPUs for gaming and CPU Benchmarks hierarchy, partly on the strength of Ryzen's higher core counts. That's not to mention the pressure from Apple's M1 processors that featur...