First Tests: Intel's 12th Gen 'Alder Lake' Core i9 Is the Laptop CPU to Beat

pcmag.com:

Just weeks after Intel announced its 12th Generation mobile chips at CES 2022, a laptop powered by the chip maker's flagship 12th Generation (“Alder Lake”) H-Series processor has made it to PC Labs. It's our first chance to test one of the CPUs and see how well the latest Intel offering stacks up against previous outings, as well as the competition from Apple and AMD.

In the past, a major part of Intel’s annual upgrade was the idea that more is better. More processor cores, more processing threads, and higher clock speeds have pretty much been the name of the game for the last several years. But there’s a new philosophy for 12th Generation CPUs, with a hybrid architecture that pairs high-powered cores and energy-sipping cores to enable better battery life along with beefier performance. Usually, one comes at the expense of the other.

We’ve been hearing about the new chips for months, and we found excellent performance in the desktop-class Alder Lake Core i9-12900K and Core i7-12700K. But this is the first time we’ve been able to test out the new CPU architecture where it will have the biggest impact: in a laptop.

Specifically, Intel sent us the new MSI GE76 Raider gaming laptop, equipped with an Intel Core i9-12900HK processor and Nvidia’s brand-new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU. (We've got much more about that new laptop-grade GPU, also launching today alongside the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti laptop GPU, in its own analysis story.) When it comes to mobile processors, this is the current top dog of '22, offering the most power available for a consumer laptop oriented toward gaming and other processor-intensive tasks.

Before we get to our first tests and impressions of the Intel Core i9-12900HK, let’s take a more detailed