CES 2022: Intel announces new 12th Gen Core processors, Arc GPU availability for partners, Intel Evo and vPro enhancements

Over at CES 2022, Intel has announced several new products covering the spectrum of mobile and desktop GPUs, and discreet GPUs alongside several facelifts for its Intel Evo certification and vPro sub-category offerings. Let’s take a look.

P-Core + E-Core Combo for Laptops

We’ll start things off with the fresh new 12th Gen Intel Core mobile processors that expand Team Blue’s hybrid architecture towards the mobile platforms that are reportedly 40% faster than the previous generations and to express they are serious, a whopping 28 SKUs are introduced across 3 separate categories: Powerful H-series, Efficient P-series, and Low-Power U-series so that everyone from heavy tasks of gaming to data-intensive applications down to small-scale business machines, everyone’s got a chance at enjoying the new architecture.

Strangely enough, even though the desktop counterparts officially support PCIe 5.0 albeit there are no consumer class components on sale yet, the 12th Gen mobile chips are shipped with only PCIe 4.0 and even lesser lanes at just 16 versus the 20 of the 11th Gen’s. Whether or not if this will cause a bottleneck towards PCIe devices especially the GPU part, only time will tell. But to be fair, OEM will get to decide whether they will be using DDR4, LPDDR4, or DDR5 RAM as the main system memory, but of course, this is going to complicate things towards the non-tech-savvy customers.

Additionally, Intel also dished out their own dynamic power shifting algorithm in the form of Intel Deep Link and with all the existing 12th Gen goodness such as native Intel Killer Wi-Fi 6E chipset and Thunderbolt 4 support. Oh, before closing off this section, selected SKUs are categorized within the new Intel vPro classification of Enterprise and Essential in which the former receives full feature sets of premium security, high-grade computing, modern manageability, and stability while the latter covers only the foundation and basics for those who are not in the full-blown multi-million dollar business.

Here’s what the 12th Gen Intel Core H-series, P-series, and U-series mobile processor will look like from a figurative standpoint.

H-series

P-series

U-series

12th Gen Locked Desktop CPUs, 600 series H and B Class platforms, new Laminar Cooler

The desktop side of things also gets some new models on the line through the so-called “Locked” chips which don’t carry the K annotation for “Unlocked” which means no innate overclocking capabilities in exchange for a slightly lower price tag alongside the official introduction of the H670, B660, and H510 which is the go-to combo for those who are not looking into pushing their rigs to the very limit. Dropping off certain premium features here and there, Intel is also happy to keep the PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support for these 3 new platforms and there’s only one reason for this: They want to be the earliest to do it and they want the adoption rate to jump up real fast. But hey, that’s some future-proof for us consumers which is great.

Announced with the new desktop CPUs are the brand new Luminar coolers of models RH1, RM1, and RS1 from left to right. As you might have figured out, the left one is for the Core i9s while the middle is for the Core i7s, Core i5s, and Core i3s while the right one is for the Pentiums and Celerons and yes, they are bundled with the “Locked” CPUs and not the “Unlocked” K-series. While the RM1 and RS1 maintain almost a standard design, the RH1 did have a little bit of R&D fun because there’s controllable ARGB now. Officially supporting the “RGB Gamer Essence” now eh.

Anyway, you may want to know about the specs sheet for these “Locked” chips and it’s down below.

65W Models

35W Models

Pentium + Celeron

3rd Edition Intel Evo

The launch of the 12th Gen Intel Core mobile processors also brought in the 3rd edition of the Intel Evo platform which has been updated and refreshed with the latest hardware requirement lists of a 12th Gen SoC for guaranteed performance, Wi-Fi 6E for absolute connection quality, dynamic background noise suppression with FHD webcam to provide the best conference call quality and more. In terms of user experience, the new certified machines must provide on-demand responsiveness, long battery life, instant wake to resume back productivity tasks immediately, fast charge for eliminating wired downtimes, and such. At least buyers will know that the devices that are coming out this year with this certification are business-ready to serve at any time.

“Alchemist” Intel Arc Discreet GPU

To close off, Intel has revealed that OEM partners have already received shipments of the Intel Arc GPUs with more than 50 desktop and mobile derivatives from brands like Acer, ASUS, Clevo, Dell, GIGABYTE, Haier, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, MSI, NEC and more to be pushed out in the near future. Armed with modern techs including hardware-accelerated ray tracing, AI-driven supersampling in the name of the Xe Super Sampling (XeSS), etc, game studios are already in works with dev kits to start and adapting to the architecture with titles like Death Stranding by Kojima Production announcing exclusive optimizations towards the Alchemist GPU and of course, the 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs for that matter. We can see how good they are actually are when they are out officially.

With yet another hybrid architecture reaching its hands towards the mobile market, perhaps the war between x86 and ARM would spark off soon?