- Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake H-Series mobile chip
At Intel’s October 2021 Innovation event, the company revealed new information about Intel12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs for desktops and at CES 2022 it debuted the 12th Gen laptop CPUs.
In the CPU arms race, Intel is betting the next steps will be more about how intelligently the processor can assign its workloads rather than raw power to get to the next generation of performance.
- Alder Lake 12th Gen overview
The Alder Lake Core series comes in the by-now-familiar breakdown of Core i9, i7, i5 and i3 groupings, which denote performance and core count. There’s also the product line suffix indicated by the letter at the end of the name: H, P or U, going in order of performance from highest to lowest.
Intel Core i9 processors will come with 14 total cores, 6 “P-Cores” and 8 “E-Cores.” The i7’s will range between 14 and 10 cores depending on the model, i5’s will range between 12 and 10 cores and i3’s will range between 10 and 6 total cores.
- Alder Lake hybrid design: what it means for laptops and power draw
All 12th Gen Intel CPUs will use a microarchitecture scheme that combines Performance-Cores (P-Cores) and Efficient-Cores (E-Cores) using two new core designs, Golden Cove and Grace-Mont.What this means for laptops, where battery life is a factor, 12th Gen Intel chips will be smarter about how they draw power during low-impact workloads.
- Only on Windows 11
The 12th gen CPUs running on Windows 11 is a feature developed by Intel called Thread Director. It takes advantage of Alder Lake’s hybrid design to intelligently route certain workloads (threads) between the P and E Cores of the hybrid CPU. Thread Director works together with the operating system to provide increased information on how to route these workloads.
- DDR5 memory support, next gen Iris Xe Graphics, Wi-Fi 6E support and Thunderbolt 4
Alder Lake processors will come with a raft of improvements over previous 11th Gen CPUs. Intel finally added DDR5 memory support, catching up to AMD processors in that regard. Intel equipped laptops will support both DDR4 and 5 memory options. Another upgrade to Alder Lake CPUs is Wi-Fi 6E support, which provides laptops access to the 6GHz signal range for faster data transfer speeds and reduced latency.
- Iris Xe Max
On the graphical side of things, Intel’s 12th Gen includes full support for Intel’s Iris Xe Graphics integrated GPU. Some 11th Gen-equivalent processors only supported the older UHD GPUs. A stronger integrated graphics component is always nice in any system, but anyone looking to seriously push their hardware will rely on a discrete GPU from the likes of Nvidia or AMD.
- Upcoming Intel 12th Gen laptops
Dell XPS 13 Plus
The next in Dell’s high-end XPS line of laptops sports a cleaner minimalistic design, 1TB of storage, 32GB of memory and options for an OLED display. Early impressions are promising, but after our hands-on, we can’t wait to really put this laptop through its paces when it launches this spring.
ASUS Zen-Book 14 and 14x
The Intel 12th Gen-equipped Zen-Book 14 that recently demoed at CES will come with 1TB of storage and 16 GB of memory. It’ll also sport two Thunderbolt 4 ports. This one is also not yet to market, but look for more info as we get closer to its Q2 2022 release.
Lenovo Think-Book 13, 14, 16 and Think-Book Plus Gen 3
Some more CES sneak peeks equipped with 12th Gen Intel chips are the latest Lenovo Think-Book laptops. The Think-Book Plus Gen 3 will come with a second display panel mounted in the base next to the keyboard, a high performance H-series 12th Gen Intel CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and up to 2TB of solid state storage.
ASUS ROG Flow Z13
Fitted with the top-of-the-line Core i9 12900H, up to 16GB of DDR5 memory, a 1TB SSD and up to a Nvidia 3080 RTX GPU, the Z13 also features a detachable touchscreen display alongside its similarly speed X13 AMD counterpart.