Alder Lake, Zen 3+ and RTX 3070/3080 Ti

Notebook News

The last year must have been a slap in the face for Intel, since AMD now also offered decent competition among the top models of gaming notebooks. Suddenly, the notebook manufacturers announced the new top GPU, an RTX 3080, together with an AMD eight-core, the Ryzen 9 5900H instead of a Core i9 from Intel, as in previous years. AMD was simply faster, not only in performance compared to Intel’s 10th gen, but also at launch. Intel just wasn’t ready with the high-end Tiger Lake CPUs and didn’t respond to the new competition until the end of the year.

Of course, the i9-11900HK again slightly beat the AMD flagship in performance, albeit with a significantly higher wattage. As if the red threat wasn’t enough, Intel is also losing on another front: Apple broke up with Intel and released the M1 Pro and M1 Max last year, which set new standards in terms of efficiency and battery life. Now it was important not to lose face there either, so Intel countered with Alder Lake in notebooks. In the last few meters of an M1’s maximum performance, the Core i9-12900HK is again slightly more efficient than the M1 itself, but not necessarily unless it’s under peak load, which it is most of the time. In terms of CPU performance, the new Core i9 is once again at the top, ahead of Apple and AMD, but again only with significantly more coal in the oven, i.e. a larger watt budget.

Nevertheless, the twelfth generation Intel CPUs are a milestone. The efficiency took a big step forward compared to the predecessors, which were not even up to date for a whole year. Because of the chip crisis, the transition between the CPU generations will overlap, as will AMD. However, an efficiency analysis by the Notebookcheck colleagues has already shown that the Core i9-12900HK lags behind a bit in terms of performance per watt. The mobile Ryzen 5000s are still ahead of the Core i9 – the Apple M1 anyway. However, as with desktop CPUs, Intel is now making bigger strides in terms of both efficiency and peak performance. This is probably due to the competition from two sides.

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