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Yoors! Well, we’ve had our time first look from CES on what Intel has in store for 2023, and the headliner should be the mighty Intel Core i9-13980HX: the new, most powerful consumer laptop processor in the world.
Looks like Intel is all about the CPUs at CES this year, not content with resting on its laurels after launching the insanely good Core i9-13900K late last year. We have the full lineup of the 13th generation desktop CPUs along with a ton of mobile processors including H, PU, and N series chips.
The i9-13980HX is the star of the show though; we’re looking at a whopping 24 cores, a world first in laptop processors. That’s 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, for a total of 32 threads. This follows Intel’s unveiling of the first 16-core laptop CPU in early 2022, also an HX-series chip that uses both performance and efficiency cores.
This new CPU is an absolute beast, with a turbo clock of 5.6 GHz and all the 13th generation goodies that Intel included in its new desktop processors last year. That means DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support, Thunderbolt 4 compatibility, Wi-Fi 6E, and improved integrated graphics performance.
Not many laptops will use this chip without one separate graphics card, Please note. Intel described the i9-13980HX in a press release as “the best mobile gaming platform in the world,” meaning we’ll likely see it pop up in powerful laptops for gamers and content creators, possibly in addition to the expected RTX 4000 mobile graphics cards.
Analysis: mighty, but we’re not thrilled
Sure, a new flagship 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 CPUs were quite competitively priced compared to AMD’s latest offerings, Intel is currently imminent price increases for the next-gen chips, which will likely extend to mobile processors going to laptop manufacturers. Needless to say, you won’t find this HX series chip in any of the best budget laptops.
Apart from everything else, no one really needs that kind of processing power in a gaming laptop; after all, modern games are much more bound by the limits of the system’s GPU than the CPU. Putting this kind of CPU into a gaming laptop feels a bit like plugging your beard trimmer into a car battery for a quick shave; we imagine it will really only be useful to pros who need as much grunt as possible.
Still, the rest of the new HX line could be more promising, with Intel claiming we’ll see five times as many laptop models with 13th Gen HX chips compared to the 12th Gen. All of these processors share the same great feature set, making them great choices for anyone looking to pick up a shiny new gaming laptop in 2023. Check out this space…
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