I’ve compared Intel’s best laptop CPUs from 11th and the new 12th gen to show you just how
big the performance difference this year is!
These are the differences in specs between these two
i9 processors. The main changes are in the core and thread counts. Last year,
Intel’s 11th gen Tiger Lake chips gave us 8 cores and 16 threads at the top end,
while this year their 12th gen Alder Lake parts go up to 14 cores and 20 threads.
The biggest change with 12th gen is the move to a hybrid architecture with P and E cores. P cores,
or performance cores, are basically your regular cores as we’ve had before with hyperthreading,
and this is basically what the older 11th gen has too. The new E cores, or efficient cores,
are smaller lower powered cores that handle less important background tasks,
and these do not have hyperthreading.
To do this testing as fairly as possible, I’m using MSI’s GE76 gaming laptop for both 11th gen
and 12th gen. Now while Intel 12th gen laptops can make use of DDR4 memory,
more expensive models like this one do use the newer DDR5, so that is going to play a part in
this comparison. It’s also just kind of how it is, right now I’m not aware of any other i9 12th
gen laptops that make use of DDR4 memory, so it’s just not possible to compare with the same memory
in any case. Basically, just consider the move to DDR5 part of the top end 12th gen platform.
In terms of actual memory read and write speed, we’re seeing more than 40% faster from the 12th
gen system, which I suspect in part is down to the differences in DDR4 and DDR5 memory.
L3 cache reads in this test were also notably faster with 12th gen compared to 11th gen.
PCIe lanes between the CPU and discrete graphics are also different this year. Last year with older
11th gen laptops, laptop makers either had the choice of using 8 or 16 PCIe 4 lanes between the
CPU and GPU. With the newer 12th gen though, they can only use up to 8 lanes for the GPU,
meaning some 11th gen laptops may have more PCIe bandwidth - which
is the case here with MSI’s GE76. This probably won’t matter in most games though,
as right now 8 lanes of PCIe 4 seems to be enough for modern gaming laptop GPUs.
Initially I was quite surprised to find that the integrated Intel Xe graphics in 12th gen
were able to offer 127% higher FPS compared to the Intel UHD graphics in 11th gen. But it makes sense
upon discovering that 12th gens iGPU has three times as many execution units. Obviously an i9
equipped laptop will probably have more powerful Nvidia graphics for gaming or content creation,
but this noteworthy difference in iGPU performance will affect some of our other applications.
With the multi-threaded Blender workload running, I found that the newer 12900HK laptop was drawing
less power from the wall when both processors are power limited to a 45 watt TDP using Intel XTU.
If we instead just let them run wild, then 12th gen was able to draw 10% more power at the wall.
If we look at the TDP reported by software, with no limit the 12900HK reports higher,
but by a higher margin compared to total system power at the wall.
Generally speaking, more power equals more heat. Now it is worth mentioning that with
their newer 12th gen laptop, MSI moved to using a liquid metal pad on the processor while the
11th gen system has regular thermal paste, so this would be factoring in too. The 11th gen
machine was consistently thermal throttling in this test, however both 11th gen and 12th gen
machines could spike into thermal throttling territory depending on the specific test.
This can make things unfair, but it’s also the real world in multi threaded workloads
with no power limit, and that’s why I’ve also included the power limited results.
Regardless of the power limit though, the 12900HK was reporting 8 degrees Celsius cooler.
These are the clock speeds measured during this same Blender test. I’ve split the 12th gen chip
into both P and E cores, as the E cores don’t clock as high as the P cores. With no power limit,
the 6 P cores in the 12th gen chip are clocking about the same as the 8 cores
in the 11th gen chip. With both power limited to 45 watts though, the 12th gen P cores aren’t
as high as 11th gen anymore, presumably as the 8 E cores need to share that limited power budget.
Here are the actual performance results from the Blender test we've been using so far.
With both limited to a 45 watt TDP, the 12th gen laptop was able to complete the longer
Classroom test 22% faster than 11th gen. This is actually a below average result,
and don’t forget it’s doing this while also using less power too
as we saw just before, so 12th gen is absolutely more efficient here.
To get an idea of how performance varies at different power levels, I’ve run Cinebench R23
three times in 5 watt increments on both processors. In this graph, the newer 12900HK
shown by the blue bar seems more consistent. At 5 watts it took about an hour for the test to
complete on 12th gen, the laptop was lagging as I guess it just needs more than this to run the OS.
Anyway after 15 watts and above, 12th gen is able to outperform 11th gen in the purple bar.
Unfortunately it’s just not practical to test every single application with that much power
level granularity, so we’ll stick to results with no power limit to represent a best case
result like with the thicker GE76, and with a 45 watt TDP cap in place to represent a
thinner lower powered design, as 45w is still what Intel list in their specs.
Performance when running on battery power was doing better with 12th gen too. When both laptops
are running on wall power, the 12900HK is scoring 41% higher in the multi core score compared to
the older 11980HK. Although both laptops lose performance when running on battery, the 12th
gen chip is now performing 48% ahead of 11th gen, a bigger margin than when both were plugged in.
Both laptops have the same 99.9Wh batteries inside.
I’ve tested both with the discrete Nvidia graphics disabled through device manager,
which I guess they didn’t like because the battery life of both ended up being far behind what it
would normally be if I just left the Nvidia GPUs enabled with optimus on. Anyway the 12th
gen machine lasted 16% longer in this YouTube video playback test with only the Intel iGPU.
Back to looking at application tests while plugged into wall power.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark, which tests out various
components of video editing. Now these results are sort of misleading but also kind of not,
let me explain. Premiere will utilize the discrete Nvidia graphics of these laptops,
and as my laptops have different dGPUs I actually disabled them through device manager,
so only the integrated Intel graphics are in use here. So in the real world we'd see
higher scores for these machines, but this is fairer for a CPU comparison. Anyway when purely
using the Intel CPU and Intel integrated graphics, 12th gen had the biggest gains
out of any application I’ve tested with a score more than twice as high compared to 11th gen.
If we drill down into the subscores we can see that the export score was twice as high on 12th
gen with no power limit, while the gap was even larger when both were power limited to 45 watts.
The live video playback performance was even further ahead with 12th gen. We’re
talking about a 180% higher score when neither are subject to power limits.
Likewise the GPU score was also a fair bit higher with 12th gen. I suppose not
too surprising as we’re going from 32 to 96 execution units this generation, a 3x increase.
DaVinci Resolve was also tested with the Puget Systems benchmark, and this test will also make
use of the GPUs available. We could of course get much higher scores with the RTX 3080 and 3080 Ti,
but again I had these disabled so we’re just looking at pure Intel processor differences
here. Oh and also potentially DDR4 vs DDR5 memory differences, which I consider just to
be part of the overall platform difference. Anyway with no power limit, the 12900HK was
scoring 46% higher than 11th gen in this test, a big improvement for a single generation.
I’ve also used my own project to test export time with Resolve, again with
the dGPUs disabled. Lower numbers are better this time as we’re looking at completion time
rather than an overall score. In this test the 12900HK was able to complete the export task 39%
faster than the 11980HK with no power limit. The difference was
smaller at 25% faster on 12th gen with the 45 watt limit in place.
Adobe Photoshop is another Puget Systems test.
These scores weren’t as different compared to with the Nvidia graphics enabled,
which says to me the processor matters way more compared to the GPU here. Anyway 12th
gen was still able to score 20% higher than 11th gen with the 45 watt limit in place.
Handbrake was used to convert a 4K h.264 video file that I shot to 1080p h.265.
This test had an above average gain for 12th gen, which was completing the
export 30% faster compared to 11th gen with the 45 watt power limit,
and then slightly faster at 33% quicker with neither being power limited.
Linux Kernel Compilation was tested with Ubuntu rather than Windows 11 like the rest of the tests.
In this one the 12th gen processor was able to complete the compile task
37% faster than 11th gen when both were capped to 45 watts,
while the gap lowered when both weren’t power limited, though 12th gen was still 22% faster.
LLVM compilation is the only other task that was run under Linux,
and the differences were a little smaller compared to the Kernel compile test just before it.
These tests benefit from more threads, so it’s no surprise that 12th gen was ahead.
The Corona renderer uses the processor to render out a scene. Again the higher thread count from
12th gen is able to help out here, allowing the 12900HK to complete the task over 30%
faster with no power limit, or 25% faster when both are power limited.
The V-Ray test is similar and has about the same margins too. The fact that the 12900HK can score
55% higher than itself at 45 watts really goes to show how much power limit can affect performance.
Thinner machines have to have lower power limits to avoid getting too hot,
so definitely expect performance to vary based on the laptop chassis to some degree.
I’ve used 7-Zip to test compression and decompression. Again there’s a larger
difference between the two processors without the power limit in place. This is a workload
where AMD’s Ryzen processors have traditionally beat Intel, so I’m very interested to see how
Intel 12th gen compares with Ryzen 6000 soon - make sure you’re subscribed for that comparison.
AES encryption and decryption also receive a nice boost this year, with 12th gen offering
50% increased cryptography performance with the 45 watt limit in place,
and about a 45% gain without any power constraints.
Now for some Microsoft Office tests. These tests had some of the smallest differences
out of all applications tested, and for some reason PowerPoint
was actually performing better on 11th gen which I triple checked.
Perhaps that particular software needs an update to be optimized for 12th gens P and E core design.
This was the only test where 11th gen was scoring better than 12th gen though.
CrossMark is a cross-platform benchmark that aims to measure overall system performance and
responsiveness. The differences were small here too compared to other applications,
with a 15 to 17% boost with 12th gen.
This test also provides a number of subscores, so we can drill down into the data a bit. It seems
like the largest improvement with 12th gen out of these three measured categories is in creativity.
This aligns with what we saw in the video editing tests earlier which had the largest gains.
Geekbench also tests a bunch of different workloads and
aggregates them into one overall score. The single core score was
18% higher with 12th gen while the multi core score difference was larger with a 43%
higher score - makes sense given the core and thread count differences at play here.
On average out of all of these applications tested, Intel’s new Core i9-12900HK CPU was
about 31% faster when compared to their older Core i9-11980HK
from last generation with both power limited to a 45 watt TDP. Now this isn’t a general statement,
it’s only applicable to this specific list of tests as it contains a random assortment of both
single and multi threaded tests. The biggest improvements were the video editing workloads up
the top, which I suspect is in part due to the difference in integrated graphics performance.
If we instead compare the same applications but with neither laptop subject to an arbitrary power
limit, the differences to video editing aren’t quite as big, but they’re clearly still receiving
the biggest boost out of this selection of tests. Outliers aside, most applications tested are
able to get solid double digit performance gains which is quite impressive. Of course much of this
is due to the majority of these workloads being multi-threaded, so nice gains should be expected
when we go from 8 cores 16 threads up to 14 cores 20 threads. What a time to be alive if you need
mobile processing power, these are some of the biggest boosts I’ve seen in one single laptop
generation in the last 6 years that I’ve been running this channel. As mentioned it’s possible
that both laptops may be subject to thermal throttling here depending on the workload, but
regardless on average we’re still seeing around a 30% boost both with and without the power limit.
If you want to see the differences in gaming between these two top spec laptops then check
out this video next. I haven’t covered gaming in this video because both of these laptops
have different Nvidia graphics, but it’s still cool to see what the best from last
year can do against the best from this year. Oh and of course make sure you’re
subscribed for all of my upcoming Ryzen 6000 and Intel 12th gen CPU comparisons.