Intel are giving us up to 24 cores and 32 threads in gaming laptops this year
with their new 13th gen processors! Here’s everything you need to know!
Just like last year, 13th gen laptop CPUs will come in U, P,
H and HX options, with H and HX being what we’ll see in most gaming models.
Let’s get straight into the specs of these new chips, starting at the top of the lineup
with HX. All three of the i9 HX processors double the amount of E cores from 8 last year,
to 16 this year, and this is how we’re able to get 24 cores and 32 threads.
The top end Core i9-13980HX boosts up to 5.6GHz,
600MHz higher compared to last year’s maximum 5.0GHz seen with 12th gen i9 laptop chips.
We’re also looking at more cache too, with 36mb, compared to 30mb last gen.
The i7 HX processors have fewer P or E cores, less cache, and are clocked
lower as we go down the list, and a similar deal with the i5 range.
The i9 and highest i7-13850HX support DDR5-5600 memory this generation, faster than last year’s
DDR5-4800, though the lower tier chips still max out at 4800, at least without overclocking.
According to Intel, in this one specific test 13th gen is able to offer an 11%
boost to single thread performance when compared to the best i9s available last gen.
There’s also a nice increase to multicore performance, which is expected due to the
additional 8 E cores that are on offer with the higher 13th gen HX options.
Other rendering workloads like Blender, which max out all cores,
were doing a fair bit better with the extra cores available from 13th gen HX,
while other content creator workloads had a smaller increase, but still a gain.
Here’s what Intel is claiming in terms of FPS boost in games with
13th gen. The comparison against AMD isn’t really fair because
the Alienware m17 they’re testing with has RTX 3080 Ti graphics at 155 watts,
while the Intel 12th and 13th gen CPU laptops run the same GPU up to 175 watts.
Anyway it depends on the game, but even in these CPU heavy titles 13th
gen doesn’t appear to offer that big of an uplift compared to 12th gen. Honestly
you’ll be getting a bigger increase this year from Nvidia’s new RTX 40 series GPUs,
make sure you’re subscribed for my upcoming video on those!
Something I found interesting is that there will be 60+ laptops with these higher tier HX
chips this year. This means there should be more budget friendly options compared to last year,
where HX was only featured in the best of the best laptops. Going from 5 HX CPU
options last year to 9 this year should certainly help with that!
Based on what we saw in my 12900H vs 12900HX comparison last year, the top tier HX chips
are really only for people that need crazy levels of multicore performance in a portable machine,
because purely for gaming let’s be real, going above the 14 cores 20 threads available to H
series is kind overkill. The higher single core boosts will help a bit,
but nowhere near as much compared to instead putting the budget towards a GPU upgrade.
Intel’s 13th gen HX platform also gives us some
other interesting platform changes. Along with support for faster DDR5-5600 memory,
discrete graphics are now able to use up to 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 5. We only saw 12th gen
HX using Gen 5 for storage in MSI’s Titan GT77. Honestly this probably won’t matter too much,
Gen 4 wasn’t exactly slow, but then again maybe the next gen GPUs coming this year
could see a benefit from Gen 5. HX is also completely unlocked for overclocking too.
It's not all about the top-end HX series, here’s how Intel’s 13th gen H series lineup is looking.
Just like last year, H series maxes out with 6 P and 8 E cores, so 14 core and 20
thread laptop processors with 13th gen, the same limit as 12th gen H series last year. That said,
13th gen H series increases the memory speed up to DDR5-5200 from 4800. Not quite as high as the
DDR5-5600 the top-end HX chips support, but still an improvement. Discrete graphics also gets up to
8 lanes of PCIe Gen 5, so half as much as what HX can support, but again, still an improvement
compared to last gen which I believe maxed out at PCIe Gen 4 for Nvidia discrete GPUs with 8 lanes.
Clock speeds also see an increase this year. The Core i7-13700H has a 5GHz P Core turbo
boost speed, 300MHz higher compared to the 4.7GHz available to the 12700H before it,
while the higher tier Core i9-13900HK is 400MHz faster
compared to the 12900HK. Cache sizes remain the same though.
Intel didn’t provide as many benchmarks for H series, which if I had to guess means the gains
aren't as interesting. But make sure you're subscribed for my upcoming comparisons. They
just used Crossmark, which I haven’t personally found to be that useful. Anyway in these different
areas, Intel is claiming a 10% uplift compared to last year’s 12th gen. It doesn’t really matter
that they’re not comparing the new 13900HK with a 12900HK, because the 12900H has the same amount of
cores, threads, clock speed and cache as HK. The main difference is that H can’t be overclocked,
so hopefully the 13900HK in the MSI Stealth 17 they’re using in this example isn’t overclocked.
Despite Intel recently teasing next gen Thunderbolt with speeds of up to 120
gigabits per second, 13th gen laptop CPUs still support Thunderbolt 4 with 40 gigabits of speed,
however the new CPUs add in support for DisplayPort 2.1 and USB 3.2 20 gigabit per second.
The integrated graphics within the processor will also support Intel’s XeSS upscaling,
which is basically their version of Nvidia’s DLSS to boost performance in games. Intel
said 13th gen will have the best support, but 11th and 12th gen will get support in
future updates. Ultimately this doesn’t matter that much for gaming laptops as
they have more powerful discrete graphics, but this could be a nice way to boost FPS
in smaller laptops that only have integrated graphics. I’d assume it’s also available with
laptops that use Arc graphics for the dGPU, but this update was specific to the iGPU.
Intel also has this new feature called endurance gaming to make the battery last
longer when gaming on the integrated graphics. Long story short, by default this limits FPS
in games to 30 to save battery, so the same sort of thing others like Nvidia have had for years.
Some Intel laptops might also ship with a VPU, which is basically dedicated hardware
for accelerating AI work so that the CPU and GPU don’t have to work as hard. I'm interested
if any games in future might be able to take advantage of it. Or perhaps are the
applications that you might run in the background while gaming. This early generation is a separate
SoC that connects via PCIe for early adopters and developers, but the way it was presented
made it sound like one day it might find itself built into the processor directly.
Otherwise Intel also provided the specs for their lower tier P and U series processors which
will be found in thinner and lighter designs. Probably not so much in gaming laptops though.
As for availability of gaming laptops featuring these new 13th gen processors,
we’re probably going to be waiting until around mid February,
at least for gaming laptops that are also paired with new GPUs.
Technically, I think the CPUs themselves will be available from January, so now. So we might
see some laptops initially with Intel 13th gen CPUs but last gen GPUs like Nvidia RTX
30 series. But I would expect most new gaming laptops to hold off until Nvidia’s RTX 40 series.
Find out more about all of the gaming laptops
coming out in 2023 over here! I’ll see you in one of those videos next!