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Intel Alder Lake-HX brings high-end performance to laptops

Monica J. White
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Intel will soon be expanding its mobile lineup with a few high-end processors for laptops. The CPUs are all part of the Intel Alder Lake-HX series.

Three of these processors have just been spotted in a benchmark, revealing more information about their specifications and possible performance.

Intel Alder Lake mobility chip.
Intel

The CPUs, found by Benchleaks in a few Geekbench 5 tests, are the Core i9-12950HX, Core i7-12850HX, and Core i5-12600HX, all of which belong to the Intel Alder Lake-HX series of mobility processors. The entire series is going to be packaged in the BGA format, and the CPUs will allegedly feature the full desktop Alder Lake die that has undergone some voltage adjustments. This was a necessity, considering the power and efficiency constraints of a gaming laptop vs a high-end desktop.

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The benchmarks, other than giving us a glimpse of the performance of these chips, offer some insights into the exact specifications. The Intel Core i9-12950HX, which is the top CPU in the lineup, already brings an upgrade over its Core i9-12900HK predecessor, upping the core and thread count to 16 cores and 24 threads. Intel is also releasing a Core i9-12900HX CPU with the same core counts, but that processor was not caught in this latest batch of benchmarks.

The CPUs were found benchmarked in upcoming Lenovo laptops and paired with DDR5 memory. Both the Core i9-12950HX and the Core i7-12850HX have the same number of cores and threads (16 and 24, respectively) but they have different cache sizes — the Core i9-12950HX sports 30MB of L3 cache while the Core i7-12850HX is limited to 25MB of L3 cache, as well as lower L2/L1 caches than the top chip. There is also a difference in clock speeds, with the Core i9-12950HX maintaining a 2.5GHz base and 4.9GHz all-core boost and the Core i7-12850HX offering slightly lower speeds, limited to 2.4GHz base and 4.7GHz in turbo mode.

Benchmarks of the new Intel Alder Lake-HX processors.
Wccftech

The Intel Core i5-12600HX is perhaps more of a mid-range processor than the other two, but it still can be competitive and will most likely find its way into some of the best gaming laptops. It comes with 12 cores and 16 threads and has very similar clock speeds to the Core i7-12850HX, rated at 2.8GHz base and 4.6GHz boost. It also has an 18MB L3 cache.

Aside from specifications, the Geekbench 5 tests give us an idea of the kind of performance we can expect from these CPUs, and the results are not exactly a surprise. Wccftech compiled them and compared them to various other processors. The Core i9-12950HX achieved 1,962 points in single-core and 15,794 in multi-core tests. These numbers put it just below the Core i9-12900H in single-core operations, but it wins the No.1 spot for multi-core tests by a large margin, defeating its predecessor.

Comparing the CPUs to AMD brings similar results, declaring Intel the all-around winner against processors such as the Ryzen 9 6900HX. However, it’s worth noting that Intel CPUs have higher power requirements than their AMD counterparts.

The first laptops containing these new chips are probably going to start releasing around the summer, so it won’t be long before we can see their performance in real-life tests.

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Monica J. White
Monica J. White
Computing Writer
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
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