Intel announces new 12th Gen CPUs for affordable thin and light laptops

Intel in a bout to expand its 12th-Gen 'Alder Lake' CPU family has launched two new ranges a new P-series and a refreshed U-series. The new range of Alder Lake CPUs are aimed at thin and light laptops for mainstream users.

According to Intel, we will get to see over 250 laptop models powered by these CPUs launch this year. This list of laptops will include 2-in-1s, detachables, and laptops with foldable displays. It further claims that these laptops will provide users with improved performance thanks to the high core and thread counts.

What is Alder Lake?

Before we get into the details of the new CPU series let's take a look at what 'Alder Lake' is. Alder Lake CPUs are a combination of heterogenous X86 P-cores and E-cores. Here P stands for power and E stands for efficiency. This combination provides the right mix of power and efficiency, providing the users with high-level performance.

New Intel 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs

The newest entrant is the P-series, which will serve the 28W “enthusiast thin-and-light” segment. The company has announced six models under the series, spanning the Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 tiers.

The company claims that the rise in the thread count will help deliver enthusiast-level performance and improved productivity.

The base Core i3-1220P will come with two P-cores with Hyper-Threading and eight E-cores. Whereas, the top Core i7-1280P will include six P-cores with Hyper-Threading and eight E-cores.

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Under the P-series, laptop OEMs will be able to provide up to four Thunderbolt ports and partially integrated Wi-Fi 6e.

Coming to the refreshed U-series, it will be made available in two package sizes: 9W for extremely portable devices and 15W for everyday users. This category includes seven new models ranging from Celeron to Core i7. The Celeron CPU comes with a single P-core and four E-cores, no Hyper-Threading. Whereas, the top Core i7 model features two P-cores, eight E-cores, 12 total threads.

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The company claims that its latest CPUs make use of the same Thread Director feature as all of the earlier 12th-Gen CPUs. This feature allows the CPUs to assign workloads dynamically between P-cores and E-cores based on power and performance requirements, and is integrated into Windows 11. It is also compatible with Windows 11, but is not as deeply optimised for the heterogeneous core architecture.

All of the new CPUs except for the 9W U-series models will support DDR5, DDR4, LPDDR5 and LPDDR4X RAM. Whereas, the 9W models will only support LPDDR5 and LPDDR4X.