Benchmarking 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake Processors for Notebooks: Lots of Cores Make the Job Easy

We were impressed with Intel’s top 12 generation desktop chips. While still power hungry compared to competing AMD Ryzen processors, their combination of high-performance cores (P-cores) and clusters of low-performance cores (E-cores) has helped them shine in all sorts of workloads, including games that require less quantity and speed. cores and video encoding and rendering tasks that benefit from every core you can throw at them.

The laptop versions of these chips, which Intel announced at CES earlier this month, don’t have access to a powerful desktop power supply or powerful cooling systems. They also do not benefit from comparison with mediocre predecessors. Desktop 11th Gen Core chips ported the new CPU architecture to Intel’s decrepit 14nm manufacturing process with unimpressive results, while laptop 11th Gen Core chips benefited from the newer 10nm process and correspondingly smaller energy consumption and heat. The 12th generation chips use the same process, although it has been renamed “Intel 7″to close the PR gap between Intel’s 10nm process and TSMC’s 7nm process.

The first Alder Lake laptop processor that fell into our hands was the top-end Core i9-12900HK, the fastest of all. In our testing, we tried to see if the laptop version of Alder Lake delivers the same balance of performance as the desktop version: fast cores when you need fast cores, and lots of cores when you need a lot of cores.

Alder Lake-N

The i9-12900HK is the number one in Intel’s line of high performance notebook processors. It integrates six P-cores and eight E-cores for a total of 14 cores and 20 threads, with a peak Turbo Boost clock speed of 5GHz for the P-cores. In the past, Intel has included eight P-cores in its fastest Core i9 desktop processors, rather than six. But most 12th generation laptop processors (from Core i9-12900HK to Celeron 7305) trade one or two P-cores for a cluster or two E-cores, on the assumption that more slower cores will be faster. be better for multi-core work.

Most Core i9 and i7 chips use the same six P-core and eight E-core configuration as the i9-12900HK, though the i7-12650H uses six P-cores and four E-cores instead. cores across the board, as well as eight or four E-cores, depending on the chip.

Unlike desktop Alder Lake processors, there is no Alder Lake chip without E-cores—no direct replacement for older chips that only used P-cores. In most cases, 12th generation chips will be as fast or faster than the processors they replace. But this means that older operating systems without full Thread Director support, including Windows 10, will never run as well on those systems as newer OSes.