Intel 12th-gen laptops are here: 5 things you need to know

Intel’s top-of-the-line laptop CPU is a clear winner, but not in every way.

-  MICHAEL CRIDER

Desktop machines might take home the prize in absolute raw power, but most users are still using laptops for practicality and ease of use. So the new 12th-gen Alder Lake Intel processors, now freshly available in portable form, are a welcome upgrade for those who need their premium processing in a to-go package.

PCWorld’s Gordon Ung took care of our usual exhaustive review of the new generation of Alder Lake chips (fave. co/3sbkwCh), starting with the absolute top-of-the-line Core i9-12900HK. He compared it to both AMD’s latest and greatest, the Ryzen 9 5900HX, and Intel’s last-gen Tiger Lake Core i9-11980HK.

Because of the nature of prebuilt laptops, the tests aren’t as perfectly controlled as desktop benchmarks. Even so, we can glean some pretty definitive results based on crunching the numbers. If you don’t have time to go through more than 6,000 words of scrupulous detail—or maybe you just can’t fit it into your lunch break—here are the important points to take away, as we wait for review units to start flowing in to inform our roundup of the best laptops (fave. co/3qL4oHf).

1. THE NEW 12TH-GEN CHIPS ARE SPEED DEMONS

Perhaps you could be forgiven for predicting this plot twist beforehand, but Intel’s new top-of-the-line chip is faster than its old top-of-the-line chip. But this is no mere iterative bump: The Core i9 Alder Lake CPU beats out Intel’s previous best effort by a considerable margin, especially when it comes to intense media applications.