INTEL’S MOBILE MONSTERS
Fancy a desktop chip in your laptop?
INTEL HOLDS LOTS of events, one of which is Intel Vision, where it shows off its latest wares. This year’s event brought HX versions of the Alder Lake ‘extreme performance’ mobile chips, which join the U, P, and H versions. These are the most powerful mobile processors Intel has made and the first to offer 16 cores in a laptop. HX chips use Ball Grid Array packaging and look like thin desktop chips. If you want to do away with your desktop and have a high-end laptop instead, these are the chips—Intel is using words like ‘desktop-caliber’ and ‘mobile workstations’.
Initially, there are seven new chips, the top one is the Core i9-12950HK, which has 16-cores, including eight dual-thread performance cores and eight efficiency cores. It has a base clock of 2.3GHz for the P-cores and a maximum boost clock of 5.0GHz. One down is the Core i9-12900HX, then there are three Core i7s, the 16-core 12850HX and 12800HX, and the 12650HX, which loses four efficiency cores. Below these are two Core i5s, the 12600HX and 12450HX, which drop to four performance cores and either eight or four efficiency cores. There’s support for DDR5-3200 and 4800, as well as 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes, the first mobile platform to reach version 5.0. Base power consumption is 55W across the range, increasing to 157W on full tilt. All carry integrated Xe graphics but they are designed to partner with dedicated GPUs.
That brings us to the Arc Alchemist project, which has hit more delays. This must be annoying for Intel, as a combined HX and Arc launch would have made waves. We’ll see the Arc mobile GPUs in late summer but it’ll be a while before you can order a discrete card for your desktop. Intel hasn’t yet said how much these highpower laptop engines will cost.