JUNE 2022 PCWorld 23the 2.4GHz/4.4GHz (turbo) 8-core Core
i5-12450HX on up to the 16-core Core
i9-12900HX, all of the chips consume 55W.
That’s 10 watts more than the 12900HK. Like
other Alder Lake chips, they use a mix of
performance and efficiency cores, managed
by Intel’s Thread Director technology in
Windows 10 and 11. In the Core
i9-12950HX, for example, the chip runs at
2.3GHz base and up to 5.0GHz turbo with a
mix of 8 P-cores and 8 E-cores for a total of
24 threads.
In fact, Rogers said that Intel adapted the
desktop version of the Alder Lake chip to
create the mobile HX family, eliminating the
“lid” from the desktop package in favor of a
laptop-friendly BGA package. Though it
doesn’t seem like much, Rogers said that it
was necessary to reduce the height of the
chip to fit it within a notebook complete with
cooling. There’s another sacrifice, too. LikeComputing Division,
said that the 12th-gen
Core HX platform was
“built specifically for
professionals in the
field who need low
latency access to data
for their entire working
data set in their
computer to do very
computational tasks in
the field.” Rogers also
said that the Intel Core
i9-12900HK is “actually the world’s best
gaming processor” (see PCWorld’s Core
i9-12900HK review [fave.co/3sbkwCh] for
more context), but the “HX is a great gaming
processor as well.”
Performance-wise, the Core i9-12950HX
is 17 percent faster in single-threaded
performance than the Core i9-11980HK and
64 percent faster in multi-threaded
performance using the SPECintrate
base2017 benchmark. Expect to see the HX
processors inside the Asus ROG Strix Scar
17 SE, the Gigabyte Aorus 15X/17X, the
MSI GT77 Titan, the Lenovo Legion 7i, the
Dell Precision 7670/7770, and the HP
Omen 17.
INTEL 12TH-GEN CORE HX
BASIC FEATURES
The 12th-gen Core HX platform isn’t a single
processor, but seven of them. Ranging from
Intel’s 12th-gen Core HX (Alder Lake-HX) processor lineup.