Intel Core i7-12700 Alder Lake Mobile Processor Leaves All Competition Behind in Leaked Cinebench Scores
It's even faster than AMD's best.
Alder Lakemobile has been making quite the rounds lately. That’s telling because the chip isn’t even officially announced yet. The amount of leaks and rumors surrounding Alder Lake-P have stirred up the conversation to the point where we can’t wait for the launch. All signs point towards a dethroning of AMD‘s crown in the mobile market and today’s leak is no different.
NotebookCheck was able to obtain Cinebench R20 and R23 scores from a trustable source and when put against the competition, it does not look for AMD or Apple. The Cinebench runs were supposedly recorded on an unreleased MSI flagship laptop featuring the Core i7-12700H processor. The other specifications of the laptop were not confirmed. Moreover, the leak reiterates the all-but-confirmed topology of the 12700H yet again and it falls in line with what we’ve previously heard.
Core i7-12700H
The Core i7-12700H is 14 core, 20 thread mobile processor featuring a TDP of 35-45W and a base clock speed of 2.7 Ghz which matches well the SKU’s name. The chip is based on the new Alder Lake hybrid architecture. This architecture takes advantage of “big.LITTLE” chip design in which two different types of cores work together to strike the best balance of performance. In the i7-12700H, there are 6 Golden Cove performance cores and 8 Gracemont efficiency cores with hyperthreading available only on the former.
The performance cores come into play in single-core intensive tasks where faster clocks are imperative. Whereas, the efficiency cores chime in when a task that requires parallel processing across multiple cores, such as rendering, is on screen. This hybrid design has so far proved to be very effective for Alder Lake on desktop where it has dethroned AMD for the crown of the best-in-class performance, albeit at the cost of worse thermals.
This trend seems to transition to mobile as well as Alder Lake-P is shaping up to a monster in every way where even the lowest tiered 12700H is beating some of the fastest flagships around, and that too with sizeable margins. Today’s leak further testifies this by showing just how wide of a gap there is between the 12700H and its contemporaries, and the fact that this on a pre-release sample that likely isn’t tuned 100% is even more scary.
Cinebench Scores
In Cinebench R20, i7-12700H managed to achieve a single-core score of 689 points and a multi-core score of 7158 points. While Intel has generally always had the lead in single-core performance, the multi-core has been AMD’s game. These numbers, however, suggest otherwise. The i7-12700H’s score of 7158 points is an impressive one, beating even the flagship Ryzen 9 mobile CPU from AMD.
But, let’s talk about those single-core numbers first. Compared to the Ryzen 5900HX, which got 570 points in the same test, the i7-12700H is about 21% faster. Keep in mind that the 5900HX is not even 12700H’s direct competition as it’s a flagship, AMD’s second best mobile CPU in fact. Moving on, the current Cinebench R20 single-core reigning champion is the Core i9-11950H… which the i7-12700H beats by 12% to take the top spot.
If those single-core numbers impressed you then you’re in for a treat. The highest multi-core score inside Cinebench R20 for a mobile chip comes from the Ryzen 9 5900HX which scored 4859 points in its run. The i7-12700, on the other hand, achieved 7158 points making the 12700H 47% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900HX. The Ryzen 9 5980HX wasn’t a part of this test as it’s available inside only one laptop which hasn’t released yet. Even if it were part of the test, the 12700 would have no problem embarrassing it.
In a leaked Geekbench test, the i9-12900HK turned out to be 61.3% faster than the Ryzen 9 5980HX so the i7-12700H smoking the Ryzen 9 5900HX with those margins seems very plausible. Not only that, the i9 crushed Apple’s M1 Max as well and as we’ll see later in this article, the i7-12700 does the same. Before we move on to Cinebench R23, it’s interesting to note that if we take the overall average, the i7-12700H is about 53% faster than the i9-11950H and 82% faster compared to the i9-10980HK.
Coming to Cinebench R23, the source did not provide single-core results at the time of this writing but we do have multi-core scores to compare, and just like with Cinebench R20, these do not disappoint. The i7-12700H netted 18,501 points in the multi-core test which is 47% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900HX, which is the fastest mobile chip in this department. Interstingly, Cinebench R23 can also run natively on the M1 Macs so, naturally, a comparison is due. Against the M1 Max found in the new MacBook Pro, the fastest MacBook that Apple makes, the i7-12700H scored 49% more points, leaving the M1 Max in the dust.
What this means going forward
Obviously, these numbers are quite damning. Unless you’re Intel, your chip, no matter how powerful, is simply losing to Alder Lake-P and it seems like the competition is so far behind all of a sudden that it might take generations to catch up! I genuinely never expected to say that for Intel again but they’ve proved themselves worthy. AMD is currently planning the launch of Ryzen 6000 “Rembrandt” mobile processors based on Zen3D or Zen3+ microarchitecture and 6nm process node. While, Rembrandt will offer a nice performance jump over Ryzen 5000 Cezanne, it won’t really give Intel a run for its money.
Ryzen 7000 is where things get real. If all goes as planned, in 2023 AMD will launch its Raphael-H mobile processors based on the Zen 4 microarchitecture, which will bump up the core count to a maximum of 16 cores 32 threads, and those will be the true response to Alder Lake. By then, Intel would also be a generation or two ahead so it would be interesting to see how the CPU battlefield looks in the future. For now, Alder Lake-P is going to be here soon and it’s about to rock the mobile market with a seismic earthquake.
