Intel Unveils Full 12th-Gen Alder Lake Mobile Lineup: Up to 14 Cores and 5.0 GHz

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Up to 14 cores, 5.0 GHz, and 115W of peak power draw

Intel finally unveiled its full Alder Lake Mobile lineup today, including the new 45W H-series that tops out at 14 cores and a 5.0 GHz boost, the 28W P-series, and the 18W U-series models. Intel claims that its 14-core 20-thread Core i9-12900HK is now the world’s fastest mobile processor, even compared to Apple’s M1 Max and M1 Pro. Intel also claims the H-series is the world’s best mobile gaming platform with up to a 28% gain in gaming and 40% gain in creativity apps over the previous-gen models.

The chips also support leading-edge DDR5 and LPDDR5 interfaces along with PCIe 4.0 and a whole host of other connectivity options. Intel’s 12th-Gen is in full production, and the first designs hit the market in February. Let’s dive in. 

Alder Lake P-Series, H-Series and U-Series Specifications

Intel's 12th-Gen Alder Lake chips feature the company's hybrid architecture, which combines a mix of larger high-performance cores paired with smaller high-efficiency cores. The chips combine big and fast Performance cores (P-cores) with clusters of small and powerful Efficiency cores (E-cores) that chew through background processes. The Golden Cove architecture powers the 'big' P-cores, while the 'little' E-cores come with the Gracemont architecture. That means these chips will run best with Windows 11 due to its Thread Director technology. You can read more about the design here.

The Alder Lake chips support DDR5-4800 and LPDDR5-5300, while Apple supports LPDDR-6400 and AMD has LPDDR5-5500. You’ll only find the DDR5 interfaces on the higher-end products, and support for standard DDR5 enables end-user configurability. Intel also has options for DDR4-3200 and LRPDDR4x-4267 interfaces, which you’ll find DDR4 options on the more value-oriented platforms. All told, the Alder Lake platform supports four different types of memory technologies, which Intel says is a first for a mobile platform.

Intel also supports the PCIe 5.0 interface for desktop chips but cited both a lack of end-user devices and a lack of time to qualify the faster interface for the mobile models. As such, all of the Alder Lake mobile chips only support PCIe 4.0.

Intel’s H-series lineup spans the Core i9, i7, and i5 families with a total of eight 45W SKUs designed for high-end laptops. These chips can consume up to 115W for short periods during intense work (duration varies based on the laptop’s cooling capabilities), which will invariably impact power consumption. Intel hasn’t provided battery life projections yet (it says it will in the future) but is frank that the Alder Lake series is tuned for performance. As such, we should expect higher gen-on-gen performance but similar battery life. Intel’s performance benchmarks below are impressive, but similar battery life won’t do much to address the elephant in the room: The Apple M1-based laptops.
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