Intel’s 12th-gen ‘HX’ chips bring 16 cores to laptops

Intel’s 12th-gen CPUs have already made a strong showing against AMD’s Ryzen 6000 chips, but now Intel is taking things to another level with its “HX” processors. They’re the first notebook 16-core notebook processors on the market, and they’re also completely unlocked and overclockable. Intel is basically aiming to give enthusiasts and content creators the same sort of power and flexibility they expect from desktop chips.

Perhaps that’s why the HX-series specs seem so familiar. At the high end, there’s the Core i9-12950HX with 16 cores (8 performance and 8 efficient), 24 threads and a maximum turbo speed of 5GHz. For the most part, it looks like Intel has scaled scaled down its 12900K desktop chip to be usable in laptops. And with a boost TDP of a toasty 157-watts (and a base TDP of 55-watts), efficiency clearly isn’t the main focus. The HX chips are powerhouses meant for beefy 15 and 17-inch workstations — don’t even dare ask about battery life.

Performance wise, Intel’s charts show that the HX chips aren’t a huge leap over its mobile H-series processors. The 12900HX offers 64 percent faster multi-threaded performance than the i9-11980HK, but that’s only slightly faster than the 12900HK (scaled figures would make these charts much more useful, to be honest). The HX processors will ship with support for DDR5 and DDR4 overclocking, as well as a new Dynamic Memory Boost feature. They’ll also have “efficient-core clocking” as well as a revamped Intel Extreme Tuning program.

Intel’s 12th-gen HX series processors will start shipping later this year in large workstations like the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 17 SE, MSI’s GE77 and 67 Raider, Lenovo’s Legion 7i, HP’s Omen 17 and Gigabyte’s Aorus 17X and 15X.