Laptop CPUs are getting more powerful with today’s announcements from Intel,
and I’ll also show you the new gaming laptops that will be using these new processors.
Earlier this year, Intel introduced their new 12th gen H45 laptop processors which went up
to 6 performance cores and 8 efficient cores, resulting in a 14 core 20 thread processor.
These would be the i7-12700H or i9-12900HK for example. But now today Intel are introducing
their new H55 processors with up to 8 performance cores and 8 efficient cores,
and this results in a 16 core 24 thread laptop processor. Which
is the same core and thread count as their higher end desktop processors.
Here’s the full HX processor lineup. These are known as H55 parts because the base power limit
has been increased from 45 to 55 watts, but of course they can go much higher depending on the
laptop design. Up to 157 watts is possible to reach the maximum turbo clock speeds.
There are both 16 core 24 thread i9 and i7 processors,
but the i9 has 20% more cache than the i7. This is an interesting difference because
with previous H series chips, the amount of cache was the same between i7 and i9.
As more CPU cache is known to give a nice FPS boost in games,
this might mean that i9 HX processors in laptops could offer a performance boost compared to i7.
Before these new H55 options, i9 only really offered higher single core boost speeds.
We’re also getting a 14 core 20 thread i7 HX processor and then lower i5 parts too,
but we’ve already got these lower core and thread counts available from other Intel laptop
processors, even with the same amount of cache, but HX also offers some additional features.
The HX platform offers support for PCIe Gen 5.
Now there aren’t exactly a whole lot of Gen 5 SSDs that you can just buy today,
but Intel mentioned the F word here, by which of course I mean “futureproofing”.
HX also allows for up to 4 SSDs and 4 memory slots, so we can go up to 16TB of storage space
and 128 gigs of DDR5 memory with ECC support in a laptop, crazy stuff.
We can see the PCIe lane breakdown here, 16 lanes of Gen 5, 20 lanes of Gen 4 and 12 lanes of Gen 3.
Not only that, but HX also offers XMP 3.0 support, so memory overclocking.
We’re not just limited to DDR5-4800 speeds, which is the case with Intel’s previous 12th
gen H series processors. Additionally, all HX chips are unlocked, despite not having Intel’s
usual K lettering scheme. This means it’s possible to further tune both P and E cores.
So what sort of a performance increase does HX actually offer?
All of these results have been provided by Intel,
so as always take them with a grain of salt until we can do our own testing.
That said, I don’t really think Intel has much reason to mislead here. Intel clearly has the
lead when it comes to both single and multi core performance on the laptop side right now. That
was just a fact even before these new HX chips. I remember with previous Intel launches they
provided almost no benchmark data at all, probably because they just weren’t that competitive,
so this change to me indicates that they think they’ve got something worth showing off now.
Intel also provided some FPS numbers from a few different games,
but unfortunately they’re kind of useless because they just list “up to” numbers without any further
information. There aren’t results from any other laptops to compare with. Honestly I was expecting
them to promote higher numbers here too due to the higher cache count present with HX, so I guess
we’ll just have to see what sort of a performance difference this makes in our own testing soon.
These are some of the brand new laptops that we’ll see these new HX processors in.
On the gaming side we’ve got HP’s Omen 17, Gigabyte’s Aorus 15x and 17x,
and it looks like we finally know why this year’s Lenovo Legion 7i hasn’t come out yet,
it seems like they might have been waiting for these new HX processors.
MSI are also bringing back their Titan desktop replacement with the GT77,
and it looks like they’ve also now got the GE77 and GE67.
Unfortunately I don’t have any information on those just yet, but I’m thinking they
could be the same as the GE76 and GE66, but with the new HX processors inside.
ASUS also have the Strix Scar 17 Special Edition, and this is what I’ve got here beside me.
Think of it as a much more powerful Scar 17,
but there are also some other improvements so we can get the most out of the HX processors.
Unfortunately I can’t talk too much about the specifics of my unit just yet,
but what I can say is you’ll definitely want to make sure that you’re subscribed
for the full review of this laptop, because seriously this thing is just on another level.
Intel has also shown us the internals of MSI’s new GT77 Titan.
This beast appears to have 4 fans for cooling.
We can see there are 4 M.2 SSD slots here. One is using the faster PCIe Gen 5,
while the other 3 are all Gen 4, though two go via the chipset rather than CPU directly.
It’s also got 4 memory slots, so it’s able to go right up to the new 128 gig limit.
MSI’s GT77 should be arriving here later this week,
so again make sure you’re subscribed for that review because I expect it to be pretty crazy.
So with all of this Intel news, what about AMD? Right now AMD still “only” have 8 cores 16 thread
options in the mobile CPU space, so it would appear that this is what competition looks like.
Intel’s laptop processors already have both the highest single and multi threaded performance,
and yet they’ve still gone out to offer these new HX chips.
Now to be fair, generally speaking Intel is usually only ahead of AMD when running
with the laptop’s charger plugged in. If we’re running purely on battery power,
AMD can still come out ahead of many Intel laptops, despite the lower core and thread count.
My main point is that HX chips probably didn’t really need to exist, but Intel went ahead and
gave them to us anyway. Which just seems a bit different compared to the Intel of
only a few years ago who just kept on feeding us quad core after quad core.
Just a few years ago it was AMD who was innovating and giving us higher
core and thread counts and now that seems to have changed. But this could of course
all change again with AMD’s upcoming Zen 4. I don’t know what’s going to happen,
but I can say that it’s definitely an interesting time in the laptop CPU space.
ASUS also announced some other new laptops just yesterday,
check out my coverage of those new models next if you missed it,
and again you’re seriously going to want to make sure that you’re subscribed to the channel for
when I review all of these new HX models. I’m expecting some pretty crazy results!