Intel 12th Gen P-Series and U-Series for thin and ultralight laptops announced

Intel-12th-Gen-P-Series-U-Series-Processors

There are two new Alder Lake CPU ranges geared for small and light laptops for mainstream customers to expand Intel’s 12th Gen “Alder Lake” CPU family.

Intel is now set to target a much broader market sector after starting the generation with high-end desktop CPUs last year and unveiling high-end gaming laptop CPUs at CES in January. It is the first time that heterogeneous X86 P-cores (for power and efficiency) and E-cores (for power and efficiency) have been brought to a general market for laptops.

A total of over 250 laptop models are expected to come out with these processors in 2022, according to Intel. For example, there will be devices with folding screens, like as the Asus ZenBook 17 Fold that was unveiled at the CES show earlier this year. Workloads that benefit from high core and thread counts, such as 3D rendering and photo processing, as well as general productivity while multitasking, are said to perform better on the new processor.

It will target the 28W “enthusiast thin-and-light” market using Intel’s new P-series classification. A total of six processors have been unveiled, ranging from Core i3 to Core i7. Increased thread counts are credited with delivering enthusiast-level performance and increased efficiency.

In contrast to the Core i3-1220P, the Core i7-1280P has a total of six P-cores with HyperThreading and an additional eight E-cores. Up to four Thunderbolt connections and partially integrated Wi-Fi 6e will be available to laptop manufacturers.

U-series will be offered in two different package sizes, one for ultra-portable devices that only require 9W of power and the other for ordinary laptops and desktop computers that require 15W of power, respectively. All seven new models range from the Celeron (one P-core, four E cores with no HyperThreading) to the Core i7 (four E cores with HyperThreading) (two P-cores, eight E-cores, 12 total threads).

Intel Thread DIrector

Thread Director is said to be the same in Intel’s latest CPUs as it was in its 12th Gen CPUs, which were released earlier this year. Based on the power and performance needs of the application, this is used to dynamically allocate tasks between the processor’s P and E Cores. The heterogeneous core architecture is compatible with Windows 10, but it isn’t optimized for it as much as Windows 8 and Windows RT.

Except for the 9W U-series, all CPUs will be able to use DDR5 and DDR4X RAM, but only the 9W U-series can use LPDDR5 and LPDDR4X. There are only two Thunderbolt 4 connections and only four PCIe 4.0 lanes for an SSD because of the tiny package’s limited IO. Eight PCIe 4.0 lanes and four Thunderbolt 4 ports support are provided by both the 15W and the 28W U-series CPUs.

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