And it is the first time that PC processor dies are used for laptops as such, thereby designing new chips with features almost identical to these. Intel has taken the “lower quality” dies (derived from the i9-12900) and has cut them nothing less than 2.2mm high to make them more efficient in terms of temperature, since consumption is high, typical of high-performance processors in this sector.
Intel Core 12 Alder Lake HX, the revolution is here
What we have in hand is no more than 7 processors with very interesting common characteristics that, as we can see, are basically distinguished in the number of cores and frequencies, which also implies different cache sizes and, with one exception, the same iGPU.
The most curious thing is that they will have the same PBP of 55 watts and the same MTP of 157 wattswhatever the processor, which denotes that they have been paired by the brand and that paying more means better silicon and thus better performance.
Before entering with the models three more details: only 3 models support vPRO and ECC and only two of the seven seen are completely unrestricted for CPU and RAM overclocking, the rest allow overclocking but with certain limits.
That said, the Core 12 HX does have memory support. DDR5-4800 and DDR4-3200 achieving a maximum capacity of 128 GB. The configuration of the oldest of the brothers, the i9-12950HX, will be 8 P-Cores and 8 E-Cores with frequencies of up to 5 GHz, from there the range will drop to the 4P + 8E of the i5, where in any case all those presented by Intel will have support for PCIe 5.0 in configuration x16 or 2 × 8 lines, capacity for 4 SSDs and two controllers Thunderbolt which we understand will be in version 4.
Support for RAID 0, 1 and 5
The capabilities of these processors extend to RAID systems, where content creators and professionals will taste them, especially when installing NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs in their computers.
As improvements in this series of laptops and novelties of these Core 12 HX, apart from the inclusion of the E-Cores that debut as such in the sector, we have Intel Dynamic Memory Boost, Intel Speed Optimizer and an improvement to the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility which the company hasn’t revealed anything about yet.
In terms of performance, Intel uses AMD’s Ryzen 9 6900HX as a base under SPECint_rate_base2017 and the numbers it offers are really interesting, because it ensures that its top of the range i9-12900HX is a 17% faster in Single Thread and a 64% faster in Multi Thread.
In other tests such as Blender, it ensures a spectacular difference from the 81%AUTOCAD a +12% and as we can see the figures and the tests are increasing until reaching the three production software where Intel claims to get a distance from AMD of the 111% nothing less.
In gaming they are not far behind, although there are no comparative results and there are several numbers in games where in all cases they are in three figures. There are no prices or availability of the laptops that will include them, but given the performance, they are not exactly cheap, and here performance is paid for.
