Intel Alder Lake-HX to introduce 16-cores to laptops

The company may repurpose its desktop chips for high-end laptops.

It has been a while since we heard anything about the full Alder Lake silicon with 8 Performance and 8 Efficient cores being planned for laptops, but the latest leak may suggest it is indeed coming. According to the entry posted by @KOMACHI_ENSAKA, it appears that Intel is beginning to distribute a test platform codenamed “Alder Lake-HX” to its partners.

Intel Alder Lake-HX, Source: @KOMACHI_ENSAKA

The test samples labeled as “8+8” refer to the configuration of 8 Performance and 8 Efficient cores, currently unavailable for laptop Alder Lake-P/U chips (limited to 14-cores). Furthermore, the HX moniker appears to match AMD’s Ryzen 6000HX series to some extent. Those are the unlocked AMD Zen3+ “Rembrandt” chips designed for high-performance gaming mobile systems.

Interestingly, the 8+8 configuration for laptops has been leaked last year. This configuration was listed on a slide as S-BGA configuration or H55. According to this slide, 16-core Alder Lake mobile would be targeting the 45 to 55W “Muscle” segment.

A supposed i9-12980HX/12990HX 16-core and 24 thread CPU will therefore as a higher-end SKU over Core i9-12900HK (45W with 14-cores).

Intel Alder Lake S-BGA (H55)

It is unclear how many HX-Series SKUs are now planned though and how much faster would they be compared to the existing H/HK series. Furthermore, should Intel repurpose desktop silicon for its enthusiast laptop HX-Series, then it would also mean a reduced number of GPU units to 32. In this case, the i9-12900HK would have three times as many.

Source: @KOMACHI_ENSAKA