Intel announced its 12th Gen Alder Lake-P processors at its CES 2022 keynote the other day. A total of eight 45W SKUs for high-performance notebooks and gaming laptops were unveiled, with the chipmaker claiming the performance crown from not only AMD but its (former) client Apple as well. Based on a hybrid core architecture, the Alder Lake-P features up to 14 cores, with six performance “Golden Cove” and eight efficiency “Gracemont” cores. The Core i9-12900HK sits at the top with a boost clock of 5GHz and 3.8GHz for the performance and efficiency cores, respectively. The PL2 power limit is set to 115W for the Core i7s and 95W for the Core i5s.
Intel went as far as to claim that its top-end Alder Lake mobile processor was even faster than Apple’s M1 Max at the same power draw. While the graph doesn’t provide any explicit details regarding the workloads tested, and the exact scores net by the various processors, the Adobe Creative Cloud and Autodesk tests below shed some more light on Intel’s test methodology:
Looking at Creative Cloud, we can see that that the Core i9-12900K is just inches ahead of the M1 Max, while in Autodesk it’s quite a bit faster due to platform limitations for the latter. In Lightroom, the Core i9-12900HK is 10% faster than its predecessor while being just 9% faster in Autodesk Revit, both not very encouraging figures.
| Cores P+E | E-Core Base | E-Core Turbo | P-Core Base | P-Core Turbo | Base W | Turbo W | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| i9-12900HK | 6+8 | 1800 | 3800 | 2500 | 5000 | 45 | 115 |
| i9-12900H | 6+8 | 1800 | 3800 | 2500 | 5000 | 45 | 115 |
| i7-12800H | 6+8 | 1800 | 3700 | 2400 | 4800 | 45 | 115 |
| i7-12700H | 6+8 | 1700 | 3500 | 2300 | 4700 | 45 | 115 |
| i7-12650H | 6+4 | 1700 | 3500 | 2300 | 4700 | 45 | 115 |
| i5-12600H | 4+8 | 2000 | 3300 | 2700 | 4500 | 45 | 95 |
| i5-12500H | 4+8 | 1800 | 3300 | 2500 | 4500 | 45 | 95 |
| i5-12450H | 4+4 | 1500 | 3300 | 2000 | 4400 | 45 | 95 |
