Intel’s NEW LAPTOP CPUS ARE COMING
Intel’s new laptop CPUs are coming – complete with up to 24 cores, 5.6GHz boost clocks, and the title of “The Fastest Mobile Processor”. This should be good – so let’s take a quick peek. These new chips are pretty mental, with the top end 13950HX sporting 8 P cores and 16 E cores, a max boost of 5.6GHz, a 55W TDP and a pretty mad list of new features. Everything from an “Enhanced Intel Thread Director” so the E cores might not break your games and be genuinely useful, to PCIe Gen5 support!
The chips still support both DDR4 and DDR5, giving laptop manufacturers a bit of flexibility when designing a new model, and it does support XMP3.0 too. You can have up to 4 RAM modules for a total of 128GB of RAM – which combined with the 24 total cores should make these productivity powerhouses. You also get support for up to two discrete Thunderbolt 4 controllers for connecting to literally everything.
In fact, the I/O layout is pretty interesting – you’ve got 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 direct to the CPU, alongside another four Gen 4 lanes direct to the CPU for your main SSD. You then have what is basically a PCIe Gen 4 8x link to the chipset, which then has up to 16x PCIe lanes available, as well as WiFi 6E, 8x SATA ports and 10 USB3 ports. Not bad eh!
I mentioned these being productivity powerhouses – and Intel seems to think so too as they’ve provided some first-party benchmarks for us to gawk at. In the BMW scene in Blender, they are quoting 79% more performance than.. The 12900HK. Wait that’s not right, the 12900HX is the one to be comparing to here, which as you can see is already something like 20-30% faster. If I’m being honest, it sure does look like the majority of the performance improvement here is thanks to the doubled E cores – maybe a hair faster clock speeds too. Still, an improvement nonetheless. Premiere, Photoshop and After Effects all show a small improvement in the Puget Bench suite, and if CAD is your thing, there is a decent improvement in the Autodesk suite too.
But the slide we are looking for here is this, the gaming results. Up to 12% faster is a pretty massive improvement although unfortunately Intel haven’t listed any of the settings or resolutions they’ve tested at here so it’s hard to know how much of a real world difference you could expect. At least they are testing apples to apples here with the 13950HX and 12900HX – although there was one thing I noticed. Both Intel machines are using the same MSI GT77 Titan chassis with an RTX 3080Ti with a 175W TDP. The AMD system is an Alienware M17 with a 155W 3080Ti – so they are testing a slower machine for the AMD results. Now Intel would probably say that they couldn’t find a 175W 3080Ti with a 6900HX (which would be a lie, XMG’s NEO 17 comes with that spec), but it’s hilarious that they think that’s find to claim “Based on in-game benchmark mode performance [..] with the same GPU”. Sure, it’s the same GPU, but one is detuned.
Realistically, you should almost always ignore first-party benchmarks from anyone – be it Intel, AMD or NVIDIA. They are marketing materials, they are designed to make their stuff good and everyone else’s stuff bad. For gaming I’d expect fairly little improvement generally – most titles are still GPU bound on laptops, with only titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator and CSGO still being a major CPU hog. For more modest chips and more modest GPUs, I suspect the difference isn’t going to be massive.
Something else Intel is announcing today is their non-K SKU desktop chips – this is very much the same as the desktop chips, more E cores, slightly improved clockspeeds and larger cache, but will be slower than the K SKU variants. They haven’t given me a full list of the new chips, but you can expect these to fill out the rest of the lineup, like the 13400 that I expect will be a great choice once again. I’ll be talking a bit more about those in my next video, featuring this bad boy – a B760 board – so make sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss that.
In short then, the 13th gen mobile chips should give a little improvement in gaming, with a larger leap in productivity on the top end chips. The hybrid architecture is improving so you should have less issues, although this is very much a ‘tock’ step, rather than the ‘tick’ of 12th gen.
