Intel Surges Forward with 12th-Gen Core Chips
Taking a cue from ARM, Intel’s new portable PC chipsets will use a hybrid architecture that offers both power and efficiency. Now, its mainstream chips will offer both performance and efficiency cores, and it is splitting them into two product families, U-series and P-series.
Intel had previously dabbled with ARM-like hybrid chip architectures in low-volume chipsets. But this is the first time it is using such a thing in its mainstream chipsets for portable PCs.
Going forward, the Intel Core U-series will offer 9- and 15-watt designs, and the P-series will land at 28-watts and offer more power and performance. (Intel will continue to offer even higher-end H-series Core processors as well.) Both will offer some mix of performance and efficiency cores, with up to a total of 14 cores on the P-series chips. The new U-series chips will provide two performance cores and 6 to 10 efficiency cores depending on the model.
In one specific example, the new Core i7-1280P chipset delivers up to 70 percent better performance than last year’s Core i7-1195G7 and AMD Ryzen 7 5800U chips, while consuming about half the energy. And Intel is even claiming to beat Apple’s M1 and M1 Pro—but not the M1 Max, which is essentially a workstation chipset—in some benchmarks.
Each of the new chipsets will bring Iris Xe graphics and will support Wi-Fi 6E, Thunderbolt 4, and PCIe 4.0.
Tagged with Intel, Intel Core