- Laptops just got a whole lot faster.
For years Intel has barely improved
their mobile CPU performance.
And when they did, they sacrificed thermals
and battery life.
Today that changes.
In this laptop we have 14 CPU cores
that can clock up to five gigahertz.
While also improving the battery life
this is the biggest generational uplift
in laptop performance since at least rising 4,000
and maybe even longer.
Oh, and this thing also has an RTX 3080Ti in it.
So just how much better will laptops be in 2022?
I'll show you right after I show you the segue
to our sponsor iFixit.
Thanks to iFixit for sponsoring this video.
iFixit's ImAGenius campaign,
highlights leaders and the right to repair movement
and shows the world that every repair
is an act of genius.
Watch until the end of the video,
to find out how you can show the world,
your act of genius and how to enter to win $100
to the iFixit store.
(upbeat music)
In this MSI GE76, we have the new Intel Core i9 12900HK.
A 10 nanometers CPU based on Intel's Alder Lake
which has already dominated the desktop space.
Alder Lake is a new CPU architecture that utilizes
both performance and efficiency cores.
In the case of the 12900HK, you get six performance
and eight efficiency for a total of 20 threads.
That's the most we have ever seen in a mobile processor.
For our testing we have two nearly
identical GE76 Raiders from MSI.
The old model has an 11th Gen i9 with an RTX 3080.
And as of yesterday, this was about the fastest laptop
money could buy.
As the first proper 10 nanometer implementation from Intel.
It was already a huge improvement
over its 10th Gen predecessor.
But it's not yesterday anymore.
How much faster is the 12th Gen in games?
15% pretty much across the board.
In CPU bound games at 1080P, we see around a 15% increase
thanks to the 12th Gen processor.
And in CPU bound games at 4K, we see around a 15% increase
thanks to the 3080 Ti.
The performance improvements and the 3080 Ti
are fairly straightforward.
We get 1200 more CUDA Cores than the normal 3080 Mobile,
and 10 extra watts to power them.
If you happen to really know your GPU specs though,
the 3080 Ti Mobile is still a fair ways off
the 10240 CUDA Cores of the desktop 3080.
What I'm more interested in though
is the mobile RTX 3070 Ti.
Judging by the specs I'm guessing the performance difference
between it and a mobile 3080
will be barely noticeable.
And laptops the 3070 Ti start at $1,500,
still a lot of cash, but not too bad
if you looked at the desktop card prices recently.
Moving from gaming to productivity,
Alder Lake really starts to shine.
The multithreaded performance improvement
is staggering with a 45% increase in Cinebench.
And the domination just continues
in all of our other benchmarks.
This is extraordinarily bad news for Andy
since multi-core performance was kind of their thing,
but AMD's real advantage on mobile
this whole time has been efficiency.
How has Intel done there?
Very well.
We rarely get the opportunity to properly test out
gen over gen battery life in laptops,
but I'm super glad we did today
because otherwise it would've been pretty hard to believe
the 45% increase in battery life
with Alder Lake.
And MSI GE76 Raider that takes us from a barely usable
four and a half hours of YouTube viewing
to a manageable six and a half.
But like that's six and a half hours in a laptop
with the largest battery you can legally take on a plane.
Intel was very far behind AMD and Apple
in terms of efficiency.
So we'll have to wait until we get an Alder Lake laptop
that is optimized for battery life rather than performance
to see if they close the gap.
We already saw an our review of the M1 Max,
that Apple doesn't have as big of a performance lead
as they would have you think.
Back then the Asus Zephyrus G16
with an 11th Gen i9 and RTX 3060
thoroughly embarrassed the M1 Max
in basically every situation where the median coder
wasn't taking the brunt of the workload.
Based off that we can pretty safely say the i9 12900HK
and the RTX 3080 Ti outperformed the M1 Max
in basically everything.
But like this laptop doesn't fit in my backpack
and goes through battery life faster
than the last verse of Rosalynn Borg.
It freaking better outperform a MacBook.
Where this battle will get a lot more interesting
is when we start seeing how Alder Lake
holds up in laptops, like the XPS 15 and AMD 14.
That are powerful,
but designed with good battery life in mind.
Fortunately, Intel has given laptop makers tons of CPU's
to experiment with this generation.
28 of them to be exact.
The H or Halo series are the super powerful boys,
like the 12900HK that we've been testing.
Of those the i5 12500H really sticks out to me.
It gets 4P cores and 8E cores,
which means that it might be able to dominate
the mid range gaming laptop segment.
Just like you'll be able to dominate the competition.
You get an LTT desk pad. lttstore.com.
Anyway, dropping the TDP down from scorching to warm
we get Intel's new P-series processors for thinner designs
that still want a fair bit of power.
Think of like a 14-inch ultra book
or thinner gaming laptops.
Top tier i7 1280P sounds like a weird resolution,
but is actually pretty similar to the 12900HK
with a much lower power budget.
The rest of the P-series have 4P cores and 8E cores
potentially eating some very versatile laptops.
This is where AMD and maybe even Apple
might be scared.
Moving to proper thinner lights
via Intel's U-series processors.
Most of which have 2P cores and 8E cores.
These are going to be rather confusing
because there are both 15 watt and nine watt versions,
but they share the same names.
Oh, Intel wanna have the 15 watt version be the i7 1265U
and the nine watt version be the i7, 1260U.
This is going to have a massive impact on both performance
and battery life.
And I could see a consumer being like,
"Oh, these two laptops, they have the same processor,
but one gets four hours more battery life.
I'll get that one."
But what they don't know is that the also have
40% less performance.
To Intel's credit though normally we find something
dumb and confusing about their lineup immediately.
This generation, we got 1138 words into the script.
So that's an improvement.
What does all this mean for AMD though?
Are they going to be stuck
just playing second fiddle once again?
My guess, it will be more of a use case dependent
sort of thing.
During CES AMD announced
the new Ryzen 6000 Rembrandt CPU's.
If we take AMD by their word, the 1.3 times improvement
and compute might be able to bring them
to a similar level of single core performance
as Intel's Alder Lake.
AMD doesn't have a hybrid architecture though.
So I doubt AMD's eight cores will be able to take on
Intel's 14 and multithreaded applications.
While Rembrandt does have going forth though
RDNA two graphics.
AKA the same graphics, the power of the Xbox Series X
and PlayStation five.
AMD says there will be double
the graphics performance available,
and there's even ray tracing support on a freaking APU.
Get subscribed because I'm super excited
to review these when they come out.
Does Alder Lake have an answer for this?
No.
In here we have the same Iris Xe graphics
with 96 execution units as before,.
Just with a 0.05 gigahertz clock speed improvement.
But hey, we've got to give AMD something here.
It's crazy what a bit of competition can do.
And Intel I'm really glad you've come back
to join the party.
The real party though, are always my segues
to our sponsor iFixit.
Thanks again to iFixit for sponsoring today's video.
iFixit takes device repair seriously.
To help support the right to repair movement
iFixit is celebrating their ImAGenius campaign.
iFixit wants to help motivate you to join fixers
around the world and commit to fixing more things this year,
by giving you the chance to win $100 to the iFixit store.
For a chance to win head over to ifixit.com/pledge,
to commit to fixing your devices,
share a photo of your most recent repair
with the #ImAGenius and tag iFixit.
That's it.
The last day to enter is January 31st.
So head over to ifixit.com/pledge
to join the right to repair movement today.
So thanks for watching.
Hit like, get subscribed.
And if this video made you, I don't know,
feel good about the computer market
maybe go check out a review of the RX 6500 XT.
What a truly terrible curve.
Bye. (laughs)