Today on store shelves you can find laptops with twelfth and thirteenth generation Intel CPUs. Should you buy the latest chips? Or is the generation gap not so bad?

At the beginning of January 2022, Intel launched its twelfth generation “Alder Lake” processors for the laptop. The mobile chips, like their previously introduced desktop brethren, brought important changes. With Alder Lake, Intel has introduced its own version of a Big.Little configuration for the first time, in which a single CPU is built from high-performance cores and low-efficiency cores.

The P-cores based on the Core architecture give Alder Lake the performance it needs for demanding workloads, while the E-cores can handle less demanding tasks more efficiently, improving consumption and therefore battery life. When necessary, all cores work together.

Raptor Lake

A year later, in early 2023, Intel introduced the mobile version of Raptor Lake. Raptor Lake is the direct successor to Alder Lake and uses the same combination of P (Performance) and E (Efficiency) cores. With Raptor Lake, Intel refines Alder Lake’s designs. However, both CPU families are manufactured on the same Intel 7 production line. Both Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors can be found in laptops these days. Raptor Lake is obviously newer, but how big of a difference is it really from Alder Lake?

Intel itself claims that the latest CPUs perform up to eleven percent better than their predecessors, with up to 49 percent better performance for workloads running on a single P-core. That is something. Additionally, Raptor Lake chips also support DDR5 and Alder Lake sticks with DDR4. However, for laptops, DDR4 is the standard, so you won’t notice much of a difference there. Intel claims that the thirteenth generation of chips has generally become more efficient than the twelfth.

On the test table

We look at two laptops that passed our test chart: the MSI Summit E16 Flip Evo with Raptor Lake and, a few months earlier, the MSI Summit E16 Flip with Alder Lake. The latest Summit has an Intel Core i7-1360P on board, the older one an Intel Core i7-1280P. Both chips have the same suggested retail price of $480 and are therefore equivalent. So what are the differences?

First of all, we note that both versions of the MSI Summit E16 perform well. We couldn’t find a big difference in terms of processor generation in the test, although both devices have slightly different configurations, which makes a direct comparison difficult. In this article we will focus on the processor.

The Intel Core i7-1280P in the Summit E16 has fourteen computing cores on board. Six of them are P-cores with a maximum clock speed of 4.8 GHz. The other eight are E-cores with a single thread per core and a maximum clock speed of 3.6 GHz. The Intel Core i7-1360P in the Summit E16 Flip Evo has two fewer P cores. The chip uses four performance cores, but they can reach 5 GHz. The eight E-cores are also clocked slightly higher at 3.7 GHz.

Core by core

First, let’s look at single-core performance. To do this, we mainly measure the computing power of the P-cores. It is immediately noticeable that the latest generation of processors from Intel performs slightly better, but the difference is not that big.

In the Cinebench test, which primarily measures the rendering performance of the cores, we see a generation jump of 5.8 percent. The more general GeekBench test only sees an increase of 1.1 percent between the two P cores. Intel claims larger differences, but these are theoretical. In a laptop like the Summit, the chips are subject to all sorts of limitations, meaning they’re usually clocked a little lower than the maximum possible. That explains the small difference.

All cores together

Things get more interesting when we look at the multi-core score. The latest chip has two fewer cores, and these are P-cores with multithreading. For example, the Core i7-1280P has a total of 20 threads and the Core i7-1360P has 16. Given the similar score of a single core, one might expect that the difference here would be small or that the better-equipped Alder Lake chip would even win. But the opposite is the case.

We can clearly see that the chip in the Summit E16 Flip performs better when all cores are used optimally. In the render test the difference is negligible. This is notable because this workload gains value from additional cores and threads. We see here that the thirteenth generation chip delivers the same performance as the older generation equivalent, but with fewer cores. GeekBench is even more optimistic. The new chip even performs 26 percent better there.

Diploma

The conclusion is nuanced. Intel’s Raptor Lake chips are significantly better than the older Alder Lake processors. However, for light workloads that don’t use too many threads, you won’t immediately feel the difference, except perhaps for the battery. Theoretically it will take a little longer.

For heavy workloads that utilize all cores, the Raptor Lake chip in the MSI Summit E16 Flip is superior to the Alter Lake chip in the older Summit E16. Here the difference is definitely noticeable for certain workloads.

In reality, a chip never works alone and other components also play an important role. For example, among the Summit laptops in our comparison, the older notebook with Alder Lake has twice as much RAM on board as the Summit E16 Flip (32 GB vs. 16 GB). For light office work, the quality of the CPU is crucial and the latest notebook is the fastest, but for heavier work such as light photo or video editing or opening large spreadsheets, RAM plays a larger role. There we see that the older laptop is more powerful than the new one thanks to the different configuration.

All things being equal, Raptor Lake is the best choice compared to Alder Lake. However, if you are looking for a balanced configuration on a budget, Alder Lake is still a very good choice. The difference between the two generations is never overwhelming. For example, it may be more interesting to buy a laptop with Alder Lake if it gives you more RAM for the same budget. We are curious to see what the relationship with the fourteenth chip generation will look like in the laptop.