Intel 12th Gen Core “Alder Lake-HX” Mobile CPU Series Will Feature 16 Cores

Intel 12th Gen Core “Alder Lake-HX” mobile CPU series will feature 16 cores and Intel may repurpose its desktop chips for high-end laptops.

According to the latest news, full Alder Lake silicon with 8 Performance and 8 Efficient cores for laptops, is indeed coming. @KOMACHI_ENSAKA has recently posted about it that Intel has started to distribute a test platform codenamed “Alder Lake-HX” to its partners.

The test samples named “8+8” refer to the configuration of 8 Performance and 8 Efficient cores. It is presently not available for laptop Alder Lake-P/U chips (limited to 14-cores). The HX monitor seems to resemble AMD’s Ryzen 6000HX series to some degree. Those are the unlocked AMD Zen3+ “Rembrandt” chips manufactured for high-performance gaming mobile systems.

The 8+8 configuration for laptops was listed on a slide as S-BGA configuration or H55 last year. The slide mentioned that the 16-core Alder Lake mobile would be targeting the 45 to 55W “Muscle” segment. So, the i9-12980HX/12990HX 16-core and 24 thread CPU will be a higher-end SKU over Core i9-12900HK (45W with 14-cores).

It is not confirmed how many HX-Series SKUs are intended to be released and how much faster they would be compared to the current H/HK series. If Intel decides to repurpose desktop silicon for its enthusiast laptop HX-Series, then GPU units will be reduced to 32.