Intel has announced its 12th gen family of mobile processors led by the flagship i9-12900HK at CES 2022. With a lot of catching up to do with Ryzen and Apple, Intel is claiming its flagship processor to be the “fastest mobile processor ever”.
The CPU maker also announced 65 and 35-watt 12th gen desktop processors with scalable power and performance while disclosing the 12th gen Core U and P series of mobile processors, which power upcoming thin and light laptops.
Last but not least, the company also announced updates to the Evo platform to incorporate new specification technologies and key experience indicators in addition to the new vPro platform offerings for expanded commercial support.
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Finally reclaiming the top spot?
Intel’s 12th gen Alder Lake desktop chips announced last fall was a big success for the company, finally allowing their offerings to compete with AMD’s Ryzen 9 series, especially the flagship 5950X across productivity and gaming.
With their new mobile chips featuring their new hybrid architecture with ARM like performance and efficiency, they’ve come up with their most powerful 45W H series of chips.
Intel claims that its flagship i9-12900HK with its 5.0GHz boosted clock speed and new design can finally outclass AMD’s Ryzen 5900HX and Apple’s M1 Max for gaming and productivity tasks.
Similar to the desktop Alder Lake chips announced earlier, these chips split their cores between performance and efficiency. Keeping this in mind, Intel has announced 14-core i9 and i7 models with six performance and eight efficiency cores (and 20 threads).
Other models, especially less powerful i7 and i5’s, drop these numbers down to eight total cores split equally between performance and efficiency on the base i5 model.
More specifically, Intel claims that their flagship chip offers up to 28% faster gaming over the i9-11980HK as well as a 44% boost in PugetBench for Premiere Pro — a task in which Intel claims they can beat Apple’s M1 Max and significant improvements in Autodesk benchmarks.
However, it’s important to note that these gains are only in performance, and the company hasn’t made any big claims in battery life. Also, considering Intel ran these tests on December 10, before Premiere Pro added additional M1 Mac optimisations, these numbers are likely to shift.
Besides, since Intel itself runs these benchmarks, we’ll have to wait until later this year for laptops featuring these processors to arrive to see how these new chips stand up to the competition.
New processors to offer more than just performance
In addition to their bold performance claims, Intel’s new processors also with several other improvements. Most notably, these chips now support WiFi 6E, Thunderbolt 4, PCIe 4.0 and support for the latest memory standards, with DDR5 memory going up to 4800MHz and LPDDR5 up to 5200MHz. Additionally, these chips also support Intel’s Volume Management Device and memory overclocking.
However, integrated support for the latest HDMI standards and PCIe 5.0 lanes is missing. Intel’s current mobile chips only offer HDMI 2.0b, and PCIe 5.0 lanes are only offered on the desktop Alder Lake series.
Although Intel’s announcement is only focussed on their most powerful 45W H-series of processors, they do have plans for 15W and 9W U-series along with the 28W P-series utilising the P-core and E-core designs also coming soon.
Intel is only saying that these chips will arrive in the first quarter of 2022 with devices running on Windows and Chrome OS both and will be powering devices like foldables, 2-in-1s and detachable, among other form factors.
Laptops featuring these H-series chips will be announced at CES 2022 itself geared up for an early 2022 release. We can expect the P and U series to debut on other computers later this year.
Here’s the spec sheet for Intel’s H-series of mobile processors
| Chip | Cores (P+E) | Threads | Max Frequency | Base Power | L3 Cache |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| i9-12900HK | 6+8=14 | 20 | 5.0GHz | 45W | 24MB |
| i9-12900H | 6+8=14 | 20 | 5.0GHz | 45W | 24MB |
| i7-12800H | 6+8=14 | 20 | 4.8GHz | 45W | 24MB |
| i7-12700H | 6+8=14 | 20 | 4.7GHz | 45W | 24MB |
| i7-12650H | 6+4=10 | 16 | 4.7GHz | 45W | 24MB |
| i5-12600H | 4+8=12 | 16 | 4.5GHz | 45W | 18MB |
| i5-12500H | 4+8=12 | 16 | 4.5GHz | 45W | 18MB |
| i5-12450H | 4+4=12 | 12 | 4.4GHz | 45W | 12MB |
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22 desktop processors for the masses
Apart from its majorly talked about mobile processor lineup, Intel also announced 22 12th gen desktop processors in the Alder Lake series, starting from the $489 Core i9-12900 to the $42 Celeron G6900.
Intel had previously announced Alder Lake desktop processors last fall, but these were limited to just six processors that were focussed on high-powered gaming setups. Intel hopes to cover a much wider range of computers with the new announcement.
The new wave of chips runs on lower power, largely 65W and doesn’t come with overclocking abilities. It also includes the F series variants that don’t come with integrated graphics and low-power 35W T series versions for most high-end chips.
However, similar to the previously announced chips, the newer ones also use Intel’s hybrid architecture along with support for things like DDR5 memory at 4800MHz as well as DDR4 at 3200MHz. They also include 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes (missing from the mobile lineup) and 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes.
Here are the specs for the new lineup
Core i9 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs (Desktop)
| Processor | Cores (P+E) | Threads | Max Frequency | Base Wattage | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| i9-12900 | 8+8=16 | 24 | 5.1GHz | 65 | $489 |
| i9-12900F | 8+8=16 | 24 | 5.1GHz | 65 | $464 |
| i9-12900T | 8+8=16 | 24 | 4.9GHz | 35 | $489 |
Core i7 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs (Desktop)
| Processor | Cores (P+E) | Threads | Max Frequency | Base Wattage | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| i7-12700 | 8+4=12 | 20 | 4.9GHz | 65 | $339 |
| i7-12700 | 8+4=12 | 20 | 4.9GHz | 65 | $314 |
| i7-12700T | 8+4=12 | 20 | 4.7GHz | 35 | $339 |
Core i5 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs (Desktop)
| Processor | Cores (P+E) | Threads | Max Frequency | Base Wattage | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| i5-12600 | 6+0=6 | 12 | 4.8GHz | 65 | $223 |
| i5-12600T | 6+0=6 | 12 | 4.6GHz | 35 | $223 |
| i5-12500 | 6+0=6 | 12 | 4.6GHz | 65 | $202 |
| i5-12500T | 6+0=6 | 12 | 4.4GHz | 35 | $202 |
| i5-12400 | 6+0=6 | 12 | 4.4GHz | 65 | $192 |
| i5-12400F | 6+0=6 | 12 | 4.4GHz | 65 | $167 |
| i5-12400T | 6+0=6 | 12 | 4.2GHz | 35 | $192 |
Core i3 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs (Desktop)
| Processor | Cores (P+E) | Threads | Max Frequency | Base Wattage | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| i3-12300 | 4+0=4 | 8 | 4.4GHz | 60 | $143 |
| i3-12300T | 4+0=4 | 8 | 4.2GHz | 35 | $143 |
| i3-12100 | 4+0=4 | 8 | 4.3GHz | 60 | $122 |
| i3-12100F | 4+0=4 | 8 | 4.3GHz | 58 | $97 |
| i3-12100T | 4+0=4 | 8 | 4.1GHz | 35 | $122 |
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