It was inevitable that Intel would release laptop processors based on its Alder Lake architecture, and that day has officially arrived.
Intel’s mobile Alder Lake stack is headlined by the Core i9-12900HK, and the company is making no bones about what it says this chip represents: « The fastest mobile processor. Ever. » It’s also touting huge gains in gaming, which we’ll get to in a moment. Sporting the same hybrid design as its higher end desktop chips, all of the 12th Gen Core H-series chips announced today combine high-performance P-cores (Golden Cove) with power efficient E-cores (Gracemont), but in a mobile package. Intel also just announced additional desktop SKUs at lower wattages, several of which are comprised entirely of P-cores. We imagine Intel will do the same with its laptop lineup at some point, but today is not that day. Here’s a look at the SKUs… There are eight processors headlined by the Core i9-12900HK and Core i9-12900H, followed by the Core i7-12800H, Core i7-12700H, and Core i7-12650H, then finally the Core i5-12600H, Core i5-12500H, and Core i5-12450H. All of these will find their way into performance laptop designs, where they will provide 12th Gen bite for gaming, content creation, and other demanding workloads. The two Core i9 SKUs feature a 14-core/20-thread design comprised of six P-cores and eight E-cores, a max 5GHz turbo frequency, and 24MB of L3 cache. The Core i9-12900HK has the added luxury of unlocked multipliers for larger laptops that can accommodate overclocking. At the other end of the spectrum, the Core i5-12450H is the entry-level SKU (so far), but it is no slouch.
