Intel Details 12th-Gen Alder Lake U- and P-Series, up to 14 Cores at 28W

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The P-series debut

Intel announced the details of its new P-series 28W family of chips and its U-series Alder Lake processors today. Overall, Intel's new processors span from a five-core 9W chip up to a 14-core 28W flagship. These 20 new chips will debut in the first designs arriving in March, and Intel expects more than 250 designs to come to market eventually. 

Intel launched its flagship 45W H-series Alder Lake Mobile processors at CES 2022, and we've seen those high-power chips take the lead in performance benchmarks over AMD's Ryzen and Apple's M1 chips. However, they still lag AMD and Apple in battery power life tests by significant margins. That's expected given the different target markets — AMD's recently-launched Ryzen 6000 Rembrandt processors aim for a blend of both performance and power efficiency in a more mainstream 35W power envelope, while Intel's inaugural 45W Alder Lake chips are tuned for high-end performance at all costs. When Intel's P- and U-series chips arrive, they'll give us a better idea of the competitive mobile landscape for the next year.

Intel already revealed the basics of its P- and U-series lineups at CES 2022, but it didn't share much information beyond the list of product SKUs. Today we learn some of the finer-grained details about the product families and also see some of Intel's performance claims, which includes up to a 70% improvement over its previous-gen Tiger Lake in multi-threaded work (at the same power level). 

Like the rest of the Alder Lake lineup, Intel's P- and U-series leverage a hybrid x86 architecture with a mix of small and large cores. They also support leading-edge I/O, with support for four types of memory interfaces (DDR5, LPDDR5, DDR4, and LPDDR4x), along with PCIe 4.0 and a whole host of other connectivity options. Let's dive in.

Intel Clears up Some of the cTDP Branding Mess

Intel's new lineup helps clear up a lingering issue with Intel's product branding. Intel has long endured criticism for its practices surrounding its configurable TDP (cTDP) feature. This feature allows a single chip to operate in a wide power range, meaning it could have different levels of performance based on the settings used. For instance, the previous-gen Tiger Lake U-series chips can operate from a 12W to 28W TDP, and the Y-series chips can range from 7 to 15W.

The problem here is that Intel doesn't require vendors to divulge which cTDP they assign to a chip. For instance, you could buy a U-series model that runs at either 12W or 28W, but because there isn't a steadfast rule that requires OEMs to disclose the TDP settings on their packaging or in the marketing materials, you often won't know the actual performance range of the chip. As an example of what can happen to performance, we tested the Core i7-1065G7 in both 15W and 25W configurations, and in games the 25W mode was on average 35% faster.

The new P-series lineup helps clear this up because the 28W chips now have their own P-series swim lane. Intel assigns a 28W base power level, meaning you're assured that level of performance at a minimum, and as with all of its chips, also assigns a Max Turbo Power that indicates peak power consumption. 

Meanwhile, the U-series models have 9W and 15W models, with the two split up into two separate packages that we'll cover below. You can distinguish between these two models based on the product naming convention (9W ends with '0,' while 15W ends with '5'), which also now allows you to determine the actual power usage of the chip. 

All in all, this seems to be a positive change that could help clear up the confusion — if Intel sticks with it through multiple generations. The last generation found the company attempting to re-brand Y-series as UP3 and U-series as UP4, both with a dynamic range of TDPs. The company also used confusing G7, G4, and G1 suffixes to communicate the graphics capabilities of its previous-gen mobile chips, but thankfully it has discarded that nomenclature with Alder Lake, too.

Intel 12th-Gen Core Alder Lake P- and U-Series

Intel's 12th-Gen Alder Lake chips feature the company's hybrid x86 architecture, which combines big and fast Performance cores (P-cores) with clusters of small and powerful Efficiency cores (E-cores) that chew through background processes. As a result, these chips will run best with Windows 11 due to its Thread Director technology (Intel says the majority of devices will ship with Win11). You can read more about the architecture here.

Intel says that its new Alder Lake models provide 9+ hours of battery life, but that is the same as its spec for its last-gen chips. Intel says this is because it has intensified the workload it uses to measure battery life by adding Bluetooth headset usage and more intense background workloads to its battery life workload.

As you would expect, AMD claims that its Ryzen 6000 chips have better performance, performance-per-watt, and battery life than Intel's Alder Lake. AMD claims 24 hours of battery life, but it is notable that AMD and Intel use very different methodologies for battery life claims — AMD tests in airplane mode with the panel brightness tuned to 100 nits while playing video only. Intel claims it could match that 24-hour rating under the same conditions, but doesn't measure under the same conditions because it doesn't think it's applicable to most users.
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