Purported Intel Core i9-12950HX Spotted in Geekbench

Some interesting new Alder Lake CPUs for laptops have been spotted in the Geekbench online results browser by Twitter based data miner Benchleaks. An octet of results highlighted today by the source appears to be from a revamped line of Lenovo laptops. If these results are genuine, then we have some important data on a new Alder Lake HX series joining the ranks of the Alder Lake H laptop parts we already know about and that are currently available for performance laptop designs. Enthusiasts will be particularly interested in the purported new Intel Core i9-12950HX with 16C/24T and a base/boost speed of 2.5/4.9 GHz. As ever take the news with a pinch of salt.

Before further ado, let us ponder a chart featuring the unannounced new Alder Lake HX laptop CPUs. We have placed them beside their nearest neighbor Alder Lake H CPUs, which were launched at the start of the year and are starting to become established options in performance and gaming laptops at retailers and online outlets.

If you ponder over the table above, you might notice a particularly large fundamental difference between the Alder Lake H and HX laptop CPUs. Yes, the CPU core counts are different (except the Core i5-12600 models,) but a larger difference in standard configuration is in the GPU cores on board. This suggests that the configuration of the new HX series is based upon desktop chips. As they will surely be packed into laptops with the latest and greatest mobile GPUs, this scaled back iGPU, with just 32 rather than 96 execution units on board, is not likely to be an issue for users.

Benchleaks has kindly compared each of the above processors against the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X desktop processor in the Geekbench benchmark results. The purported scores suggest the new Core i9-12950HX, for example, is nearly 8% faster than AMD's powerful desktop CPU in single threaded tasks, and nearly 28% faster in multithreaded tasks. If true this is impressive considering a laptop vs desktop CPU. Admittedly Intel's new top-end mobile chip has 16C/24T vs the AMD 8C/16T configuration, but the Alder Lake HX should be running within the 55W TDP range according to the rumor mill (Alder Lake H was 45W), which the Ryzen has a 105W default TDP.

For a better comparison we wanted to find a modern AMD Ryzen 6000 series mobile chip to compare. A quick search found a laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU to pit against the newfound Intel Core i9-12950HX, and you can see this comparison below. In summary the Intel mobile CPU is 17.5% faster in single core, and 29% faster in multithreaded tests in this instance. We really need to find out the power consumption usage differences, but remember the new HX can't be sucking an outlandish amount of power or it would throttle excessively in a laptop form factor.

Please take the above leaks based information with a pinch of salt, particularly the benchmarks as a worthwhile measure of performance in the real world. As mentioned above the power usage of the new Alder Lake HX series seems to be the biggest mystery now. We have seen AMD's Technical Marketing lead, Robert Hallock, protesting vociferously about Intel's latest gen laptop CPUs chewing through "desktop class" wattage, so we will have to wait and see how the HX series achieves its great benchmark figures.

It will likely be May or June before the first devices packing an Alder Lake HX laptop CPU are launched. With this timescale in mind, the new processors could feature in a raft of Computex 2022 laptop launches.