Leak reveals Intel’s new Alder Lake-HX chips with 16 cores

By Caleb Clark Published April 19, 2022

Intel has a new set of laptop CPUs coming out. Though the processors haven’t been officially announced, Chinese news outlet ITHome has uncovered the specifications for the new chips.

The new processors will be beefed-up versions of Intel’s regular mobile Alder Lake lineup, with up to 16 cores and 24 threads. The new mobile processors (called Alder Lake-HX), are meant to compete with AMD’s new Ryzen 6000 processors. Intel’s chips will have up to twice as many cores, but we will have to see how their individual performance actually holds up.

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We also have a solid idea of what the base and boosted clock speeds are on the chips. These clock speeds are still unconfirmed, but you can see the full breakdown of the leaked specs in a handy table over at Tom’s Hardware.

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The Alder Lake-HX models are expected to receive a 10-watt power boost.

The Core i9-12900HX will be the most powerful option, with 16 cores, 24 threads, a 2.3GHz base clock speed, and boosted clock speed of 5.0 GHz. As Tom’s Hardware notes, though, only eight of those will be performance cores. The i9-12950HX has the same cores and clock speeds, but also comes with Intel vPro, which is designed for business users and offers boosted performance and battery life.

Battery life will be important on these devices, too. As Tom’s Hardware reports in the same article, the Alder Lake-HX chips are expected to have a hefty power draw. The current Alder Lake-H chips have a 45-watt processor power base (PBP) draw. But the Alder Lake-HX models are expected to receive a 10W boost, making the PBP 55W. We don’t know what the max turbo power of the HX processors will be, but the Alder Lake-H chips top out at 115W.

Intel has not officially announced these chips yet, so some details may change as they are rolled out. Asus recently announced its “Pinnacle of Performance” event for May 9, and there sis speculation that the Alder Lake-HX chips will be unveiled there.

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Caleb Clark is a full-time writer that primarily covers consumer tech and gaming. He also writes frequently on Medium about…

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