“The most powerful mobile processor ever created”And Best gaming platform…Intel has no shortage of superlatives to praise 12th generation core processors For the laptops available from February, especially its star, Core i9-12900HK.
It is the first generation of Intel mobile processors based on the Intel 7 clone process (supposed to provide a performance increase of 10-15% per watt) as well as exploiting the Alder Lake architecture. This hybrid architecture is a major change for the founder, mixing high-performance cores with energy-efficient cores for the first time — a heterogeneous combination that’s been around for years on smartphones and now on Macs with Apple Silicon chips.
Alder Lake: Intel is chasing its way to catch up with Apple (1/2)
Alder Lake: Intel is catching up with Apple (2/2)
In this case, the Core i9-12900HK has 6 fast cores and 8 thrifty cores (14 in total), compared to the M1 Max chip in the MacBook Pro which has 8 fast cores and 2 thrifty cores (or 10 in total). Economic cores of the Intel processor can reach 3.8 GHz and powerful ones go up to 5 GHz, when the fastest cores of the M1 Max are limited to 3.23 GHz. Combined, these characteristics make the Core i9-12900HK a more powerful processor than the M1 Max processor, at least by the standards set by Intel.
In Blender, accompanied by an Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU, the Core i9-12900HK is rendered 30% faster than its predecessor, the Core i9-11980HK, as well as faster (without details) than the M1 Max and M1 Pro. What the graph does not show, but it does Detailed Intel fileis that the Nvidia GPU alone is consuming 160 watts and the CPU is consuming up to 115 watts on its part. The 16-inch MacBook Pro used in the comparison uses a maximum of 120 watts.
Also note that this standard was undoubtedly implemented using a version of Blender that is not optimized for Apple’s Metallic Graphics API. This improvement only started appearing for a few weeks in the alpha version.
Intel also presents its latest products as more powerful – sometimes in a very marginal way – than the M1 Max on CrossMark, Premiere Pro (PugetBench) and Autodesk (Cadalyst test). Demonstrating the Core i9-12900HK’s superiority is far from impressive, as can be seen from the graph below which shows that the M1 Max is capable of operating at much lower consumption.
This has been the difficulty Intel has faced for years: managing to deliver more powerful processors without massive consumption, something Alder Lake hasn’t been able to do so far compared to Apple’s latest computers. Intel does not announce any improvement in autonomy with its new generation. By adopting the M1 Max chip, the 16-inch MacBook Pro took a little weight (355 x 248 x 16 mm for 2.2 kg), but it doesn’t compare to a chip MSI GE76 Rider Intel used it in its tests, a monster measuring 397 x 284 x 25mm and 2.9kg accompanied by a 280W charger.
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