Ahead of CES 2022, Intel unveiled its latest 12th Gen Alder Lake chip, which has the company’s new hybrid architecture and is led by the Core i9-12900HK, which Intel boldly claims is “the fastest mobile processor” ever.

One of Intel’s biggest achievements in recent years was its first wave of 12th Gen Alder Lake desktop chips last fall, allowing the company to deliver a CPU that could compete with AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X flagship in productivity and gaming.

And now, Intel is introducing the same revolutionary approach to chip design—with its Arm-esque performance and efficiency cores—to laptops, starting with its most powerful 45W H-series versions of CPUs.

That performance gain is significant. The 12th-generation i9-12900HK is up to 44 percent faster in PugetBench and up to 30 percent faster in Blender, according to Intel’s own data.

On both tests, the Intel CPU outperformed AMD’s Ryzen R9 5900HX and Apple’s M1 Max.

INTEL 12TH GEN ALDER LAKE H-SERIES CHIPS

Intel also announced the future 12th-gen CPUs that will come to thin and light laptops later in Q1. Two performance and eight efficiency cores will be added to U processors for thinner laptops, while up to six performance and eight efficiency cores will be added to the P line for more powerful thin-and-light laptops.

In Q1, Intel’s 12th-generation H laptop CPUs will be available in devices.

This year at CES 2022, AMD unveiled its new Ryzen 6000 CPUs, which feature AMD’s improved Zen 3 Plus architecture, a new 6nm production node, and the company’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture for its integrated GPUs. Up to 1.3 times quicker processing, up to two times the gaming capabilities of the previous generation, and up to 24 hours of battery life are all promised by AMD.

The new laptop processors follow in the footsteps of the Ryzen 5000 family, which was revealed at CES 2021 last year. The Ryzen 6000 processors will be available in two series: an H-series line (with 35W and 45W models of each chip) for more powerful gaming and creative devices, and a 15W to 28W U-series line for thin-and-light laptops, similar to those models.

It has eight cores, 16 threads, a base clock speed of 3.3GHz, and a boosted maximum speed of 5.0GHz, as well as 12 GPU cores with a maximum boost speed of 2.4GHz, making it the lineup’s flagship. AMD adds that the 5.0GHz maximum boosted clock speed there marks the “fastest Ryzen product” ever — on both mobile and desktop (which is technically accurate from a raw frequency perspective, given that the Ryzen 9 5950X for desktop from 2020 maxed out at a 4.9GHz clock speed) (which is technically true from a raw frequency perspective, given that the Ryzen 9 5950X for desktop from 2020 maxed out at a 4.9GHz clock speed).

The introduction of AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture for the Ryzen 6000 series’ integrated graphics — which is used on next-generation gaming products like AMD’s RX 6000-series GPUs, the Xbox Series X / S, and the PlayStation 5 — is also a huge boost for the company’s laptops, which had previously used the older Vega architecture.

According to AMD, the Ryzen 6000 series offers up to twice the graphics performance compared to Ryzen 5000 chips, with hardware ray tracing integrated into and a 50 percent bigger GPU compute engine. This is before AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution supersampling, which is also built into the new CPUs and allows for “fully playable AAA gaming on an ultrathin” notebook, is factored in.

With up to 73 fps on Deathloop and up to 114fps on Call of Duty: Vanguard using the super-sampling approach, AMD’s benchmarks notably highlight its U-series CPUs (which are more likely to be found on a laptop without a discrete GPU).

While the new Ryzen 6000 chips still use the Zen 3 architecture, AMD has made significant enhancements, particularly in power management, which allows for a maximum of 24 hours of battery life, thanks to inherent gains from the lower 6nm production node (up from 21 hours on 2021 models).

Lastly, there’s the deluge of new hardware standards that the Ryzen 6000 series will support: USB4 with data transfer rates at up to 40Gbps, PCIe Gen 4, DDR5 at up to 4,800 MT/s and LPDDR5 at up to 6,400 MT/s, HDMI 2.1 with support for high frame rates and VRR, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth LE 5.2. However, it will be left to device manufacturers to provide the hardware required to take advantage of that support.

The first laptops powered by AMD’s new Ryzen 6000 CPUs are already expected to be introduced at CES 2022 from firms like Acer, Asus, Alienware, Lenovo, Razer, and HP. For 2022, AMD anticipates over 200 “luxury” Ryzen 6000 laptops to be available, with the first units shipping in February.

Today, MediaTek and AMD announced a partnership to co-engineer industry-leading Wi-Fi solutions, beginning with the AMD RZ600 Series Wi-Fi 6E modules, which include MediaTek’s new Filogic 330P chipset. In 2022 and beyond, the Filogic 330P chipset will power next-generation AMD Ryzen-series laptops and desktop PCs, delivering fast Wi-Fi speeds with low latency and less interference from other signals.

AMD and MediaTek developed and certified PCIe® and USB interfaces for modern sleep states and power management, which are critical elements of modern customer experiences, to optimize the AMD RZ600 Series Wi-Fi 6E modules with a focus on delivering seamless connectivity experiences for customers. Furthermore, the optimization process included stress testing and ensuring compatibility standards, which may reduce development time for OEM customers in the long run.

Filogic 330P supports 2×2 Wi-Fi 6 (2.4/5GHz) and 6E (6GHz band up to 7.125GHz) connectivity standards, as well as Bluetooth® 5.2 (BT/BLE). The high throughput chipset is extremely fast, with up to 2.4Gbps connectivity and support for the new 6GHz spectrum at 160MHz channel bandwidth. The Filogic 330P chipset also incorporates MediaTek’s power amplifier (PA) and low noise amplifier (LNA) technology to help optimize power consumption and reduce design footprint, allowing it to be embedded in laptops of all sizes.

AMD RZ600 Series Wi-Fi 6E Modules Specifications

The AMD RZ600 Series Wi-Fi 6E modules extend AMD’s Wi-Fi capabilities, providing excellent connectivity solutions to OEMs and end-users whether they are playing the latest interactive games, working remotely, or completing a large project.