Intel's Core i7-12700H Benchmarked Against Apple's M1 Max

Intel's 12th Generation Core 'Alder Lake-P' processors for high-performance laptops are months away, but some people in the PC supply chain are just too impatient not to share benchmark results of the upcoming notebooks powered by these chips. But sometimes, early performance numbers fail to impress.

Alleged Geekbench 5 results obtained on Gigabyte's Aero 5 XE and HP's Omen 17 laptops with Intel's Core i7-12700H inside were added to the benchmark's database on Friday, revealing the performance of the upcoming mobile Alder Lake-P in this popular synthetic benchmark. The numbers demonstrated by both machines are really close, so we can assume that the readings are more or less accurate. Meanwhile, it looks like both machines are equipped with DDR4-3200 memory, which might have limited their performance in single-threaded workloads. 

Intel's Core i7-12700H CPU packs six high-(P)erformance Golden Cove cores and eight energy-(E)fficient Gracemont cores, so it should perform considerably better compared to Intel's existing mobile CPUs in multi-threaded workloads. Because Alder Lake-P officially lacks AVX-512 support, the processor will be slower than chips supporting these instructions in certain workloads. Since overall GB5 results are heavily impacted by cryptography, it makes sense to look at integer and float benchmark results of the new CPUs and compare them to respective numbers obtained on other processors. 

One thing to note: since Gigabyte's notebook scores 6% higher in multi-thread workloads, we are using its numbers in our table.

Quite surprisingly, Intel's Core i7-12700H 'Alder Lake-P' fails to beat the Core i7-11800H 'Tiger Lake-H' as well as AMD's Ryzen 7 5800H 'Cezanne' (Zen 3) in single-threaded workloads. Furthermore, it is considerably behind Apple's M1-series system-on-chips that have been single-thread performance leaders for about a year now. Perhaps, usage of faster memory would have given Intel's ADL-P an advantage, but we will need to run our own tests to find out.

In multi-threaded Geekbench 5 workloads, everything looks much better for the Core i7-12700H as it leaves behind both the Core i7-11800H and the Ryzen 7 5800H. Still, Apple's M1 Max with its 10 cores (eight high-performance cores, two energy-efficient cores) beats Intel's upcoming offerings in all GB5 multi-threaded tests.

There are two things to note about the current benchmark results. Firstly, since Gigabyte's notebook scores 6% higher in multi-thread workloads, we are using its numbers in our table. Secondly, since we are months away from commercially available laptops based on Intel's Alder Lake-P processors, take early benchmark numbers with caution since many things may get optimized and performance numbers in various benchmarks will get higher.