Intel propels laptops to 16 cores with ferocious Core HX laptop CPUs

Move over, Core i9-12900HK. Intel is adapting its desktop processor to create the Core 19-12950HX.

- MARK HACHMAN

Intel has announced the 12th-gen Alder Lake-HX (12th-gen Core HX) processor series, splitting the difference between an extreme gaming processor and one designed for workstations and content creation. The flagship, the Core i9-12950HX, is the company's first 16-core chip designed for laptops and will run as fast as 5GHz across its eight performance cores and eight efficiency cores.

If the product designation sounds familiar, it should. AMD launched its own Ryzen 5900HX (fave.co/316kG9H) at CES in January, which they called the "world's best processor for gamers." While Intel isn't making a similar claim, the company is saying you'll see this chip in the most extreme gaming laptops as part of Intel's H-series chips for enthusiasts.

Daniel Rogers, senior director of mobile product marketing within Intel's Client Computing 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 19-12900HK is "actually the world's best gaming processor" (see PCWorld's Core [fave.co/3sbkwCh] for 19-12900HK review 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 SPECint_rate_ base 2017 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