Alder Lake i7-12700H Shows Impressive Performance at 115W TDP

New performance results for Intel's upcoming Alder Lake Core  i7-12700H mobile processor have appeared on Twitter thanks to user @9550pro. The popular leaker shared three tweets, one relating to the Cinebench performance of the new processor and the second regarding the processor's integrated graphics performance. A third tweet talks about Cinebench R20 performance with an even higher 135W TDP. It's safe to say this processor is an incredible performer if these results are valid.

The chip's specifications are no joke, which will explain why this chip is so fast in the benchmarks below. The i7-12700H comes with 14 cores and 20 threads, with six of those being performance cores and eight being efficiency cores. You'll also find 24MB of L3 cache, which Intel calls Smart Cache. Unfortunately, the thread count only goes up to 20 because the E-cores lack HyperThreading. 

Intel lists three turbo-boosting frequencies for this CPU on its ARK website. The first is the Efficient-core Max Turbo Frequency which peaks at 3.5GHz, while the second is the Performance-Core Max Turbo Frequency of 4.7GHz. Finally, the Turbo Boost Max 3.0 Frequency is also rated for 4.7GHz. These are effectively the PL1 and PL2 Turbo specifications.

Power draw is rated for a minimum of 35W, a base power of 45W, and a maximum turbo power of 115W. These are the minimum and maximum power limits OEMs are allowed to use in their notebook designs, so don't expect every single 12700H to run at a peak of 115W.

Cinebench Benchmarks

In the first tweet demonstrating the 115W TDP of the i7-12700H, the CPU ran both Cinebench R20 and R23, as well as CPU-Z's version 17.01.64 test. In the R20 results, the i7-12700H scored a whopping 690 points in the single-threaded test and 6802 in the multi-threaded test.

This makes the i7-12700H the fastest mobile chip by a long shot compared to previous generations, handily beating AMD's Ryzen 7 5800H and Intel's i9-11980HK mobile CPU. 

Even more impressive is the 12700H's ability to beat desktop chips like the Ryzen 7 5800X and i7-11700K, courtesy of results taken from our official reviews of those processors. 

The same story also applies in Cinebench R23 and CPU-Z's tests, but with an even greater degree of bias towards the i7-12700H.

However, the story doesn't end there. If we look at the 135W TDP results for the 12700H, the performance gap becomes even wider with a Cinebench R20 score of 7392 points, giving the CPU an additional 8% more performance in this benchmark.

The 135W TDP results specifically were done on a 2022 MSI Vector GP66. 

Integrated Graphics Benchmark

Unfortunately, the other tweet showcasing the IGP performance of Intel's i7-12700H and i5-12500H doesn't tell us much at all. The chart shows these CPUs' frame rates compared to Nvidia GPUs such as the RTX 3050, GTX 1650, and MX 450.

However, the games benchmarked for the Nvidia cards are different from the games benchmarked on the Intel CPUs. Even worse, most of the CPUs and GPUs listed don't have an associated game attached, meaning we don't know what they were running.

We also don't know what notebooks these chips were running in, making these results a rough performance estimate.

At best, the benchmark does tell us the i7-12700H featuring DDR5-4800MHz memory can output 61 FPS average in F1 2018 at 1080P. The i5-12500H, featuring the same memory config, can output 55 FPS in DOTA2 at 1080P resolution.

However, we can't compare these results to any other GPUs, so we shouldn't put much weight behind them.