Intel Vision is celebrating these days and one of the most anticipated announcements we already expected was the Alder Lake-HX family a set of chips aimed at the high-performance notebook market. And with the cards on the table, we can confirm that Intel did not disappoint us. On the contrary, and on the virtuous path they have embarked on, especially since the arrival of this twelfth generation, they are once again overcoming themselves with Alder Lake-HX.

As you may remember, the Alder Lake-H, Alder Lake-P and Alder Lake-U families were introduced last January, with which the twelfth generation Intel Core landed on the notebook market. The top of the range at the time was the Intel Core i9-12900H (and its unlocked sibling, 12900HK), with its 14 cores (six high-performance and eight high-efficiency) and 20 fibers, with a maximum frequency of up to five gigahertz, 24 MB of L3 cache and all with a base consumption (without turbo) of only 45 watts .

Now Cat Alder Lake-HX Intel goes one step further with chips with up to 16 cores (eight for performance and eight for efficiency), which, as you may have counted in your head, actually offer an amazing total of 24 threads. Personally, and especially considering that we’re talking about integrated laptops, it seems like a real barbarism (in a good way, an eye), and even more so, considering that we’re talking about CPUs with basic power consumption. only 55 watts, that’s say 10 more than the Alder Lake-H range. Of course, when it comes time to give it all, its consumption can increase up to 157 watts.

As you can see, the top of the Alder Lake-HX range points out Core i9-12950HX and 12900HXThe main difference is the first supports ECC (Error Correcting Code) memory and is compatible with the Intel vPro platform. For the rest, and as you can see, both have 16 cores, eight power (between 2.3 and 5 gigahertz) and eight efficiencies (between 1.7 and 3.6 gigahertz) for a total of 24 fibers. Both have a 30 MB L3 cache. In the graphics part, the integrated GPU has 32 execution units and is able to operate at speeds up to 1.55 gigahertz.

The second step of the Alder Lake-HX consists of chips that connect to the Core i7 family. There are three options in this group, although two of them share specifications and differ on the same points as the two Core i9 Alder Lake-HXs, ie Intel vPro support and RAM compatibility with ECC. They are Core i7-12850HX and 12800HXboth also with 16 cores (up to 4.8 gigahertz) and 24 threads, 25 megabytes of L3 cache and a GPU with 32 execution units and a frequency of 1.45 gigahertz.

Close this group Alder Lake-HX Core i7-12650HXconsisting of 14 cores, six power (between 2 and 4.7 gigahertz) and eight efficiencies (between 1.5 and 3.3 gigahertz) for a total of 20 threads and equipped with 24 megabytes of L3 cache memory.

Finally we go down to the Alder Lake-HX Core i5, where we find two integrated. First of all we have Core i5-12600HX, consisting of 12 cores, four for power (between 2.5 and 4.6 GHz) and eight for efficiency (between 1.8 and 3.3 GHz) for a total of 16 fibers. It integrates an 18 MB L3 GPU cache with 32 execution units at 1.35 gigahertz and is compatible with Intel vPro and ECC RAM for error correction. Finally he’s here Core i5-12450HXwith eight cores (four of each type) and twelve threads, 12 megabytes of L3 cache and GPU with 16 execution units and a speed of 1.5 gigahertz.

Alder Lake-HX: Performance

Once we’ve seen the new Intel chipsets that will be responsible for the most powerful laptops on the market, it’s time to evaluate the features that are inherent in this new chipset, namely differences between Alder Lake-HX and Alder Lake-H, the two options for users looking for the highest performance are not limited to using a higher number of cores that provide higher performance. There are other very interesting news. Of course, before entering them, it’s worth seeing the performance comparison that Intel shows:

As we can see, the Alder Lake-HX not only represents a significant leap in performance compared to its predecessor, represented by the Intel Core i9-11980HK, it is Evolution can also be observed in the still recent Core i9-12900HKwho has so far held the gold medal in terms of performance. Seen this leap within the same generation, there are growing expectations about what we will see with the advent of Raptor Lake.

With Alder Lake-HX, Intel focuses on workstations designed for very demanding tasks in a professional environment. This is clear to us when we see support for Intel vPro and RAM with ECC. However, it is obvious that Players are an important part of the target group of this new line of chips. As an example of the performance gained by combining the Core i9-12900HX with the GeForce RTX 3080 Titanium Mobile and 64 GB DDR5-4800 RAM (not the type of SSD used), Intel shows us the following references:

News from Alder Lake-HX

The most remarkable thing is undoubtedly that With Alder Lake-HX, PCIe 5 support finally comes to laptops. As we told you at the time, Alder Lake was the debut of DDR5 and PCIe 5, but so far only the first of the two technologies has hit laptops. Now, with the leap offered by HX chips, laptops can also take full advantage of the fastest SSDs on the market, using x16 or 2 × 8 modes.

Another very interesting novelty is the one all Alder Lake-HX SKUs have been designed with overclocking in mind and subsequently support OC system memory and CPU cores, and for this purpose we will be able to use a set of technologies and tools designed and updated by Intel for this purpose.

Intel has also made progress with the announcement of the new Alder Lake-HX chips some of the laptops that will be equipped with an integrated HXAnd it’s no surprise to know that we are talking about some of the most powerful models on the market, as you can see in the following image.

So we already have Intel chips for the equipment that sets the highest standard for the twelfth generation Intel Core in the notebook market. Sure let it not be long before they start to see the first performance data, whether in prototypes or in final facilities that are still in the testing phase. It will be very interesting to know his first steps in the real world and compare Alder Lake-HX chips with the rest of the current generation of chips.

More information: Intel