Intel ‘Alder Lake HX’ Unveiled: New 12th Gen CPUs Fire Up Mobile Workstations

Intel today pulled back the curtain on its 12th Generation “HX” processor platform, the most powerful tier of its “Alder Lake” silicon for laptops. The HX was built for use in mobile workstations and top-end gaming laptops.

HX chips will be positioned above the enthusiast-grade 12th Gen H and HK Series CPUs, as its unrivaled option for professionals who need as much processing performance as possible. This platform will appear in a handful of chip models in Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 form, with the marquee Core i9-12950HX chip sitting at the top of the stack.

At the extremes of CPU performance, raw core and thread counts aren’t as important as they used to be for dictating processor capability, but they still make a major difference. How many have been added to the HX platform, and what other efficiencies could make the HX the best fit for mobile workstations? Let’s dive in to the details.

Introducing the HX Family: Mobile Alder Lake Meets Workstations

First, a look at the full stack of seven HX processors. While this platform will enable top-end performance, that applies to a variety of systems: Some will be bigger, thicker mobile workstations and gaming laptops, and others will be thinner machines. Thus, as mentioned, the HX chips will launch in the Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 tiers…

As mentioned, core and thread count is far from the only factor in modern processing speed, but they are still important. You’ll note nearly all of the Core i7 and Core i9 chips feature 16 cores and 24 threads (save for the Core i7-12650H), with a split of eight Performance cores (P-cores) and eight Efficiency cores (E-cores).

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of these P- and E-cores, they’re a key part of Intel’s Alder Lake architecture, meant to be deployed on different types of processing tasks at different types, depending on the demands of the moment. In short, this hybrid architecture and Windows 11's Thread Director feature determine which applications should be handled by which set of cores—active tasks versus background processes—and directs traffic accordingly for the most efficient handling of your workload. 

This is not new to the HX platform, so for a full breakdown, read our Alder Lake explainer. The P- and E-cores are still very relevant to the types of workloads that HX systems will see, though. Intel is aiming to maximize efficiencies between the hardware and software, putting the appropriate amount of processing power behind the right tasks so that the user can still work with their laptop as needed while other tasks are grinding away in the background, allocated to avoid perceptible impact.

One example of this is seeking to avoid a full system lockup under load, or as Intel casually referred to it in a 1:1 briefing we had, a “walk-away event.” This can happen with super-demanding workstation tasks, where the full power of the laptop is eaten up by crunching through a big data set or completing the rendering task you asked it to do. While this is happening, the computer will be unresponsive, and other applications will run very slowly or not at all. Thus, you may be tempted to get up and walk away while it completes.

Sometimes, that kind of maximum-power, all-engines focus is what you need from your system. But in many instances, you’ll want some of the power devoted to that task, and some cores free to let you keep working while a task completes in the background. The HX line of chips will, in theory, use its superior architecture and greater number of cores to maximize these efficiencies, though it is always a work in progress and a balancing act, and its effectiveness as a tactic can vary depending on the application or applications in question. 

In normal laptops, extending battery life is a bigger part of the equation, but less so in mobile workstations. These power machines are more concerned with completing the task at hand (usually, used when plugged in) than keeping your battery charged through the day.

Intel also noted that this core-efficiency behavior is best optimized for when the system is left on its default balanced performance mode. Pushing it up to maximum performance mode can indeed send more juice to the processor, as needed, but it will result in more of those “walk-away” moments, as it overrides the intelligent optimization that Intel built into the platform.

All of this adds up to the idea that with the HX CPUs, Intel is seeking to bring more of the experience and advantages of Intel's Alder Lake desktop platform to mobile. Part of that, of course, is that the raw performance from the cores is still vital to completing pro-grade work—let’s see how that shakes out in comparison to existing options.

HX's Performance Promises: A New High for Mobile Computing

Intel's 11th Generation family of “Tiger Lake” laptop chips had no such HX chips; the Core i9-11980HK was the best it had to offer. On the 12th Gen side, Intel used the Core i9-12900HK as the point of comparison in our briefing. These two chips are eight-core/16-thread and 14-core/20-thread processors, respectively, meaning the HX platform represents yet another not-insignificant bump in core and thread count. 

Intel showed us some benchmark data about how this translates to a notable performance increase. Apply a dash of the usual salt grains until we can test these chips ourselves. But the results look like a promising gain over the (already proficient) Core i9-11980HK and Core i9-12900HK…

You can see the supposed performance gains across a variety of applications relevant to engineers, animators, and other demanding professional workloads. In one Blender scenario, Intel claims up to a whopping 81% improvement over the Core i9-11980HK, and in the SPECworkstation suite, Intel claims significant gains across a variety of benchmarks. 

Intel cites high gaming frame rates, as well. Even though these chips are largely positioned as workstation CPUs, a number of big gaming laptops that go all-out on power will offer them as the top-tier processor option. High frame rates are always good, but they are mostly just as dependent on a potent GPU as other 12th Generation CPUs are. Expect some incremental performance gain associated with the greater performance capacity.

Again, take these exact gains with those same grains of salt. (Exact measurements, the systems tested, and the specific benchmarks presented could always look more favorable than average use cases.) Until we can test the chips ourselves, all this remains theoretical, but this is what HX should bring to the table.

On top of that, like processors with the “K” designation, the HX chips are unlocked. This means core and memory overclocking are available, with updated utilities to help tune the clock speeds. In the case of memory, DDR4 and DDR5 overclocking is available. How big an appeal CPU or memory overclocking will be in a given OEM laptop will depend heavily on the design and how much headroom the laptop designer left in the thermal hardware.

HX Laptops and Connectivity

These speeds are why Intel is positioning the HX platform as the go-to option for the most demanding workloads and a fit for mobile workstations. This silicon will appear primarily in larger mobile workstations that serve as primary machines for productivity. But some slimmer professional machines will also see these chips.

Intel previewed a few systems from Dell, HP, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and Lenovo that range from big-screen (mostly stationary) workstations to big game laptops and slimmer workstations. The full Core i5 through Core i9 stack will be useful in outfitting each of these accordingly.

The benefits of this platform come down to more than just cores and clock speeds, though. We mentioned DDR5 overclocking—the HX platform has broad memory support for DDR4-3200 and DDR5-4800, with error-correcting ECC memory support for workstation applications that demand it. It also features PCI Express lanes with support for PCI Express Gen 5 (plus, as many as 48 total PCIe lanes), up to four SSDs, and up to two Thunderbolt controllers.

The last items (which include x20 PCIe Gen 4 lanes and x16 Gen 5) should be encouraging for a subset of professional users for whom I/O support and connectivity speed is as important as processor core speed. Those crunching large data sets, complex models, and any other work dependent on processing and data transfer speeds stand to gain.

HX-bearing laptops will begin launching soon—check back to PCMag for the first CPU benchmark tests and reviews of these systems as we get our hands on the first few.