yowsers! Well, we had ours first look from CES what Intel has prepared for 2023, and the main topic must be the powerful Intel Core i9-13980HX: the new, most powerful processor for consumer laptops in the world.
Intel seems to be focusing on processors at this year’s CES, not content to rest on its laurels after launching an incredibly good Core i9-13900K end of last year. We have a full lineup of the 13th generation desktop processors along with a ton of mobile processors, including H, P, U, and N series chips.
However, the i9-13980HX is the star of the show; we’re looking at as many as 24 cores, the world’s first achievement in laptop processors. That’s 8 performance cores and 16 performance cores for a total of 32 threads. This follows Intel’s unveiling of its first 16-core laptop processor in early 2022, also an HX series chip utilizing both Performance and Performance cores.
This new processor is an absolute beast, with a 5.6GHz turbo clock and all the 13th Gen benefits that Intel has incorporated into its new desktop processors last year. This means support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, compatibility with Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 6E and increased performance on integrated graphics.
Not that many laptops will use this chip without discrete graphics cardremember. Intel described the i9-13980HX in a press release as “the world’s best mobile gaming platform”, meaning we’ll most likely see it in powerful gaming laptops and content creators, possibly along with the expected RTX 4000 mobile graphics cards.
Analysis: powerful, but we’re not excited
Sure, the new top dog in the world of laptop processors is certainly cause for celebration, but the fact remains that the 13980HX will simply be out of reach for the vast majority of consumers.
While Intel’s 13th Gen desktop processors have been fairly competitively priced against AMD’s latest offerings, Intel is currently imminent price increases for next-generation chips that will likely include mobile processors that will go to laptop manufacturers. Needless to say, you won’t see this HX series chip in any of them best budget laptops.
Apart from everything else, no one really requirements this kind of computing power in a gaming laptop; After all, modern games are much more constrained by the limitations of the system’s GPU than the CPU. Putting this kind of processor into any gaming laptop is a bit like plugging a beard trimmer into a car battery for a quick shave; we imagine this will only be really useful for professionals who need as much grunting as they can.
Still, the rest of the new HX lineup could be more promising, with Intel saying we’ll see five times more laptop models with 13th-gen HX chips compared to 12th-gen. All of these processors share the same amazing feature set, making them a great choice for anyone looking to buy a shiny new gaming laptop in 2023. Explore this space…
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