Excellence

For the person, product or technology that advanced the PC more than any other in 2022

"Intel is still the backbone of the vast majority of laptops out there, and so the major leap forward in 12th Gen CPU performance and efficiency effectively raises the bar for all notebooks in the space from lightweight tablet 2-in-1s to premium gaming workstations."

INTEL’S 12TH-GEN MOBILE CPUS

Despite all the supply chain issues and economic chaos, tech companies were actually able to deliver a wide range of seriously-impressive novel technologies in 2022. The APCA 2023 Excellence award is for the person, product or technology that progressed the PC the most in 2022 and whether it’s AMD’s vertically stacked CPU V-Cache or RDNA 3 chiplet GPU architecture; Nvidia’s advances to powerful GPUs and next generation DLSS; or Apple’s continuation of it’s RISC processor range with the M1 Ultra, which outperformed all but one consumer CPU on the market at launch; there’s no doubting that 2022 was huge for PC developments.

There were even more developments in updated Wi-Fi 6E networking technologies, the living room PC got perhaps its biggest flood of novel large-format monitors, and new game game streaming technologies all contributed to help people expand where and how they can use their computers. But while all these technologies were significant, there was one technology that made a bigger difference to the overall PC landscape than any other. Intel’s 12th generation notebook processors adopted a dual-type core structure, consisting of single-threaded efficiency cores and hyper-threaded performance cores that dramatically increased the number of cores Intel used in notebook CPUs and facilitated between nine and 37 percent performance bumps on chips all the way up to the Intel Core i9-12900HK. This is a major shift from the 10 to 15 percent year-on-year performance jumps we are used to seeing and allowed Intel to convincingly outpace AMD’s offerings and compete, in many ways, with Apple’s processors.

Intel is still the backbone of the vast majority of laptops out there, and so the major leap forward in 12th Gen CPU performance and efficiency effectively raises the bar for all notebooks in the space from lightweight tablet 2-in-1s to premium gaming workstations.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Microsoft PC Game Pass QD OLED monitors AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D / V-Cache

FINALISTS

AMD Ryzen 5800X3D / V-Cache

Nvidia RTX 4090 Nvidia DLSS 3

QD OLED monitors Apple M2 CPU Wi-Fi 6E 10GbE LAN

Intel 12th-Gen Mobile CPUs, Microsoft PC Game Pass AMD Chiplet GPU Apple M1 Ultra CPU