Reviews coming in for Intel's Alder Lake laptop CPUs suggest that they are not only miles ahead of their AMD counterparts in terms of real-world performance, but also a significant improvement over their immediate predecessors. Previews and early benchmarks for the new laptop chips earlier this month suggested that the Alder Lake CPU chips will be the new yardstick in the segment, and the latest testing scores seem to confirm those reports.
Intel announced its 12th-generation Core laptop processors earlier in January. The lineup is led by the top-of-the-line Core i9-12900HK, which the company proclaimed as the world's fastest laptop chip. Early benchmarks have already shown it to be beating both AMD's and Apple's laptop processors in several applications, and the full-fledged reviews seem to underscore those earlier findings.
In PC World's test, the 14-core Core i9-12900HK beat the 8-core Ryzen 9 5900HX in both multi-core and single-core scores in virtually all apps and benchmark indices. In the 3D modeling benchmark index Cinebench R23, the Intel chip reportedly trumped the AMD processor by almost 17 percent. It proved even more potent against its own predecessor, the 8-core 11th-gen Core i9-11980HK, which trailed the new chip by 27 percent in the same benchmark. While the 14-core behemoth was always expected to get the better of chips with a lower core count, single-core benchmarks also show just how fast the new Intel chip really is. In Cinebench R23's single-core tests, the 12th-gen Core i9 scored 27 percent better than the Ryzen 9 and 17 percent higher than the 11th-gen Core i9.
A Massive Advantage Across All Benchmarks
The same story repeated itself in Chaos Group’s award-winning V-Ray 5 benchmark, which shows a 23 percent gain for the new Core i9 chip when compared to the Ryzen 9. Against the 11th-gen Core i9, it proved 30 percent faster. In the open-source Blender 3.0 rendering and modeling application, the new Intel chip showed a 9.8 percent performance edge over the Ryzen 9 and a 23 percent gain over the 11th-gen Core processor.
Similar stories were repeated in AI benchmarks and content creation performance. On Nero Score 3.01 AI benchmark index, the Core i9-12900HK showed a 43 percent advantage over the Ryzen 9 and 39 percent over the 11th-gen Core i9. In Adobe Photoshop, the Core i9-12900HK showed a 24 percent advantage over the Ryzen 9, while in Adobe Lightroom Classic, the Alder lake chip proved stronger than the Ryzen 9 by 32.2 percent and by 11.4 percent against the 11th-gen Core i9.
ArsTechnica also tested the new chip on Geekbench, Cinebench, 3DMark CPU benchmarks, and Handbrake video transcoding. As most people would have guessed by now, it was a similar story all across. In all the aforementioned tests, the 12th-generation i9 outpaced the 11th-generation i9 by about 33 percent. While the Alder Lake chip was always expected to have the edge in multi-threaded apps with its six performance cores and eight efficiency cores, the results in the single-core tests were stunning, and something that establishes Intel's 12th-generation Core i9-12900HK as the one to beat in the segment.
Source: PC World, ArsTechnica