Intel Alder Lake HX chips unveiled for ultra-powerful laptops

16/5/2022

Intel has today unveiled a new family of processors called Alder Lake HX, which look to be the most powerful mobile CPUs the company has launched so far.

Intel will launch a total of seven Alder Lake HX mobile processors at first, with the most powerful being the Intel Core i9-12950HX.

The Alder Lake HX range join Intel’s 12th Generation family, and will share the same architecture, but have been designed specifically for workstation laptops that require a desktop-calibre performance. This means you won’t be finding these new chips inside any ultra-portable laptops such as the Dell XPS and Acer Swift ranges.

The new Alder Lake HX chips will feature up to 16 cores and 24 threads, which Intel claims is a first for a notebook. They will also support up to 128GB of DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 technology to ensure its future-proofed for the foreseeable future.

But what kind of performance can we expect from these new chips? Intel indicates that the new HX chips will see a 80% boosted performance compared to the previous generation, while the new Intel Core i9-12900HX will see 10% to 20% more multi-core performance than the existing Intel Core i9-12900K CPU.

Intel has described the Alder Lake HX chips as offering “unrivalled performance for creators”, while also suggesting that the “HX is a great gaming processor” too.

Intel has also confirmed that every single Alder Lake HX processor will be unlocked, allowing users to overclock the CPUs if they fancy queezing out even more power.

The Alder Lake HX CPUs will ship in more than 10 new laptops from major companies – such as Dell, HP and Lenovo – before the end of the year. Some laptops that have already been confirmed include the HP Omen 17, ROG Strix Scar 17 SE, Lenovo Legion 7i and Dell Precision 7770.