Intel 13th gen: the future of laptops at CES 2023
Intel 13th gen: the future of laptops at CES 2023
Next-generation laptops with Intel 13th gen processors are here for everyone
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Intel’s lucky 13th gen
📣 Intel has announced its 13th-generation mobile CPU lineup
👑 Intel 13th gen processors are led by the Core i9-13950HX
🤓 Up to 24-cores and 5.6GHz on laptops
📅 Should appear in new laptops very soon
Intel 13th gen processors, codenamed Raptor Lake, are making their way to laptops after causing a huge splash on desktop computers with chips like the Intel Core i9-13900K. The same architecture behind Intel’s best CPUs is becoming portable.
At CES 2023, Intel launched its 13th-generation mobile lineup, and rather than a staggered release, it has chips for every type of laptop on the market, along with some fresh desktop SKUs. The highlight, of course, is the new 13th-generation HX series, which will be behind the best gaming laptops of 2023.
Imagine pairing these Intel 13th gen CPUs with the best GPUs?
Raptor Lake is essentially a refinement of Alder Lake, boosting core counts and clock speeds to maximize performance for the best laptops. For instance, the Intel Core i9-13950HX is a 24-core processor with a maximum boost clock of 5.6GHz. On a laptop.
This technology will be filtered out across all sectors of laptops, from thin and light Ultrabooks to workstation laptops designed for heavy data work. These processors should start showing up in laptops within the next couple of months, but it’ll ultimately be up to individual laptop manufacturers.
Talking Intel 13th gen numbers
These new Intel processors for laptops come in 4 different flavors. You got the HX series for the thick and powerful gaming laptops and workstations. Then, there’s the H-series for thinner, but still beefy gaming laptops like the Razer Blade.
For more mainstream devices, you have the P-series and the U-series, which will be behind laptops like the Dell XPS 13 and the HP Spectre x360.
Every single processor in this lineup features Intel’s hybrid chip design that debuted with its 12th-generation Alder Lake processors. What this means is that instead of a standard 8-core processor, with each of the 8 cores featuring basically the same performance, the cores are divided into two different categories: Performance and Efficient Cores.
Performance Cores are where heavily threaded tasks are processed: Tasks like gaming or video editing require huge bursts of power. On the other hand, Efficient Cores are great at keeping background tasks out of the P-Core’s way so that they can focus on the harder work.
This is a design philosophy that’s been implemented in the best phones for years, generally known as big.LITTLE and popularized by ARM. Alder Lake took the world by storm when it released in early 2022 mostly because this approach had been awful on Windows for years. But Intel and Microsoft worked closely together and were able to optimize it for Windows 11 to the point where Team Blue’s processors are the fastest x86 chips around.
And now, the second generation of Intel’s hybrid CPUs are about to become available in laptops. Hopefully, this means even better performance and battery life, but as always we’ll have to get it into our lab to know for sure.