Intel 'Alder Lake HX' Unveiled: New 12th Gen CPUs Fire Up Mobile Workstations

pcmag.com:

Intel today pulled back the curtain on its 12th Generation “HX” processor platform, the most powerful tier of its “Alder Lake” silicon for laptops. The HX was built for use in mobile workstations and top-end gaming laptops.

HX chips will be positioned above the enthusiast-grade 12th Gen H and HK Series CPUs, as its unrivaled option for professionals who need as much processing performance as possible. This platform will appear in a handful of chip models in Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 form, with the marquee Core i9-12950HX chip sitting at the top of the stack.

At the extremes of CPU performance, raw core and thread counts aren’t as important as they used to be for dictating processor capability, but they still make a major difference. How many have been added to the HX platform, and what other efficiencies could make the HX the best fit for mobile workstations? Let’s dive in to the details.

First, a look at the full stack of seven HX processors. While this platform will enable top-end performance, that applies to a variety of systems: Some will be bigger, thicker mobile workstations and gaming laptops, and others will be thinner machines. Thus, as mentioned, the HX chips will launch in the Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 tiers…

As mentioned, core and thread count is far from the only factor in modern processing speed, but they are still important. You’ll note nearly all of the Core i7 and Core i9 chips feature 16 cores and 24 threads (save for the Core i7-12650H), with a split of eight Performance cores (P-cores) and eight Efficiency cores (E-cores).

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of these P- and E-cores, they’re a key part of Intel’s Alder Lake architecture, meant to be deployed on different types of processing