What Is The Fastest Laptop Processor? – 2023 Updated guide

A central processing unit (CPU), often known as a processor or simply a chip when speaking in a more generic sense, is located in the center of every laptop and desktop computer. This component is accountable for the majority of the activities that take place within the device.

AMD, Intel, Apple, and Qualcomm are the companies that produce the central processing units (CPUs) that may be found in modern laptops. The choice with CPUs may appear endless, and their names will be confusing. Once you understand some fundamental laptop CPU principles, selecting one will be much simpler than you initially anticipate.

This guide will help you decipher the technical language that haunts the specification sheets of every laptop, from core count to gigahertz and from TDP to cache quantities so that you can choose the most suitable one. Because the laptop CPUs cannot be replaced or upgraded in the same way that some desktops’ processors can, it is crucial to select the appropriate option when purchasing a laptop in the first place.

What Is The Fastest Laptop Processor?

According to our preliminary benchmarks, Intel’s 12th-generation Core i9 is the world’s fastest CPU for a laptop. According to the results of our benchmark testing conducted on preproduction computers, the Core i9-12900HK is, in fact, the “fastest laptop processor ever.” The claim that the Intel Core i9-12900HK is “The fastest mobile processor” has been verified as being accurate by the product in question.

Performance Of The Intel Core i9-12900HK – The Fastest Laptop Processor

Our look ahead will begin with the well-known Cinbench R20 from Maxon, which will be run through its default multi-threaded test. The company’s Cinema4D 3D modeling and rendering engine is the foundation for Cinebench. This engine is available for purchase as a separate application and bundled with other software, such as Adobes After Effects. It attaches cores to its body, and the more seats it has, the faster it moves. When you consider that Intel’s 12th-generation Alder Lake H processors have a hybrid design, the results that we observe don’t come as much of a surprise. This flagship Core i9-12900HK uses six upgraded “performance cores” and eight “efficiency cores.” This indicates that having 14 cores results in increased solid performance in Cinebench R20, even though eight of those physical cores have a lower weight than Ryzen’s and 11th-generation cores.

Despite this, the 12th-generation Core i9 is expected to be approximately thirty percent faster than the Ryzen 9 5900HX and the Core i9-11980HK.

Game #1: Cinebench R20

Most apps don’t use all the computer’s available cores, even though we’d hoped they would. Cinebench R20 was also run on a single thread to test performance. This single-core version of testing may be more relevant to your everyday usage than how many cores you have.

It is obvious that Intel’s 12th-generation “Alder Lake” cores have a remarkable way of improving their efficiency of every clock. To illustrate, the Core i9-12900HK made by Intel is about 16% quicker than AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900HX and 9.3% faster than the 11th-generation Core i9-11980HKL from Intel. Although neither of these competitors are slow processors; when AMD first uncovered the Ryzen 9 5900HX during summer 2018, it seemed like a giant compared to all of the other CPUs released before it; however, the impact was later lessened with Intel’s 11th Core i9-11980HK, which was still very powerful. This time around, there truly is a new giant in town.

Game #2: Cinebench R23

Following that is the comparable Cinebench R23, which, in contrast to Cinebench R20, needs approximately ten minutes to complete. This is a crucial aspect since all modern CPUs produce heat while they run, and they reduce their browser performance when they reach a specific temperature. Cinebench R20 takes around a minute or two to complete, but Cinebench R23 takes ten minutes and is likely to cause CPU performance issues due to its length. The good news for the 12th-gen is that it is still in the lead, as it still has more cores than the 8th-gen, which has only 14. The 3D performance gaps between the CPUs have shrunk slightly, but the Core i9-12900HK maintains a commanding 16 percent lead over the 11th-generation Core i9 and a 23 percent lead over the Ryzen 9 5900HX.

Since Maxon’s Cinebench R23 offers a current version of Apple’s new M1 range, users interested in comparing Mac performance can also do so directly, which is an additional benefit of running Cinebench R23. Although we have not conducted our detailed performance tests on the MacBook Pro 14, our sister publication Macworld has, and they have reported that the computer’s CPU core logic M1 Pro CPU helped it get a score of 12,381 in those tests. Compared to a MacBook Pro 14, this would give the 12th generation Core i9-12900HK a 21 percent determinant of performance edge. Macworld did not evaluate the M1 Max; nevertheless, other media sites have stated that the 3D graphics performance of the speedier M1 Max falls somewhere between 12,300 to 12,700.

For Cinebench R23, we use single thread scoring as with Cinebench R20. Interestingly, the contrast broadens here, with the 12th generation Core i9-12900HK outperforming the 11th generation Core i9-11980HK by around 26.5 percent and the Ryzen 9 5900HX by about 16.6 percent. Macworld provided the M1 Profound in a MacBook Pro 14 with a score of 1,531 out of 5,000 potential points. The 12th-generation CPU has an advantage of 23.6 percent over the M1 Pro in this comparison.

The next benchmark to get above is BAPCo’s CrossMark. It is essentially a more condensed version of its expansive SYSMark test, which measures extreme performance profiles based on actual applications running on the computer. CrossMark, on the other hand, is not constructed using commercial applications but rather open-source software. Its purpose is to measure productivity, creative output (photo and video), and responsiveness, which CrossMark defines as the ability to switch between software or launch an application. Its thermal design CPU power to run equally well on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android platforms and is compiled using open-source compilers. Regarding Windows personal computers, the 12th-generation Core i9 is impressively 21.5 percent quicker than the 11th-generation Intel processor and impressively 36 percent faster than the Ryzen 9 5900HX.

Once more, we did not have a score for CrossMark for MacOS; nevertheless, the public database that BAPCo releases indicates that the fastest M1 Max laptop has a score of 1,670; this places the Core i9-12900HK at approximately 18 percent quicker than the M1 Max. It is always challenging to know the provenance of the results when using public benchmark databases, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best. When looking at the specifics, the M1 Max has a slightly higher score than the 12th-generation Core i9 in the Creativity category, with a score of 2,254 compared to the 12th gen’s 2,132. Still, the newest Intel CPU has a score that is 25 percent higher than the M1 Max in the Productivity category, with 1,874. Interestingly, the Alder Lake H consumer system also dominates the M1 Max in CrossMark’s “Responsive” test, achieving a score of 59.9 percent higher than the M1 Max and a total of 1,836 for the core architectures of the Core i9 processor.

We believe it is reasonable to compare the performance of this GPU to that of the 11th-gen core chip GE76 Raider; however, given the difference in battery power (thermal design power user), consumption between the two GPUs is only 10 watts. The victory goes to the 12th-generation GE76 equipped with a Core i9-12900HK since it achieves a frame rate of approximately 11.8 percent quicker than its competitors.

Game #3: Far Cry New Dawn

Our next video game benchmark is Far Cry New Dawn, which was played at a resolution of 1080p while using the ultra-quality setting. The catch here is that this game series has been known to make fun of AMD’s chips for a long excellent time. However, that began to change when AMD released its Ryzen 5000 series of desktop chip lines, which allowed the company to surpass Intel’s finest 10th-generation desktop CPU finally. The Ryzen 5000 laptop, on the other hand, has a smaller cache, which may prevent it from achieving the same level of performance, a crunching wait time. However, because the Core i9-12900HK laptop has a GPU thermal budget that is 35 percent bigger than the Ryzen 9 budget system, we do not believe that it is necessarily fair to compare the two directly. Still, you can use it as a point of reference.

We do believe that it is reasonable to compare the performance of this GPU to that of the 11th-generation GE76 Raider; however, given that the difference in base power consumption between the two GPUs is only 10 watts. The victory goes to the 12th-generation GE76 equipped with a Core i9-12900HK since it achieves a frame rate of approximately 11.8 percent quicker than its competitors.

Game #4: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Our final gaming performance result comes from the widely played game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which, despite its widespread popularity, is a graphically simple commands in games. We were under the impression that this would make it a CPU-intensive game that relied heavily on the CPU, but the surprising thing is that the results mirror the changes in GPU base power between the various laptops. Even though the Core i9-12900HK laptop is significantly more potent than the 11th-generation notebook, the gap between the two is only about 6 percent. If we want to make any serious headway in the casual gaming world, we’ll have to hold off till the final drivers are released.

Our final official score was kept for the Official CPU Benchmark of Twitter Shouting Matches, Geekbench 5. It is a well-known, cross-platform benchmark centered on a collection of relatively simple programming “loops.” These loops are intended to replicate various activities, including text decompression, JPEG decompression, encryption, artificial intelligence, and other similar operations. The subscores, which provide a deeper look into the performance of each result, are where the majority of the value that Geekbench offers, in our opinion. Additionally, we never compare effects on other platforms unless necessary. However, this isn’t how Twitter hot takes are made, so we’ll focus on the total score.

Conclusion

Consequently, the Intel Core i9-12900HK chip has an enormous advantage of 56.6 percent over the Ryzen 9 5900HX processor. The performance of the 12th-generation processor is comparable to that of its predecessor, the 11th-generation Core i9, but it is improved by forty percent. Again, it is essential to remember that these are not slow central processing units. The 11th-generation Core and Ryzen 9 processors delivered jaw-dropping performance as recently as the summer of 2018, which makes the victory of the 12900HK all the more astonishing.