Intel
Intel’s 13th Generation Desktop Processor Refresh is interesting because CPUs across the lineup scavenge additional clusters of four or eight E-cores, vastly improving how they handle heavily threaded tasks. The new laptop processors that Intel has also announced are much less exciting – those that will be found in most laptops increase clock speeds and support faster memory, but are otherwise mostly identical to the 12th generation processors they replace.
This is not uncommon; Intel 7th Generation Refresh was just as low-key, and so was the 10th Gen. Long gone are the days when each year brought either a new architecture or a new manufacturing process. Just be aware that when shopping for a laptop, moving from the 11th to the 12th gen represents a much bigger jump in performance (and, sometimes, reduced battery life) as the jump from 12th to 13th generation.
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Because they are repackaged desktop chips for mobile, HX processors improve more than other 13th generation laptop processors. Like desktop processors, they fetch additional electronic cores.
Intel
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Those extra electronic cores make a bigger difference to multi-core performance than faster clock speeds for single-threaded tasks.
Intel
Intel spent most of its presentation talking about the high-end HX-series processors, mostly because they’re the only ones noticeably different from their 12th-gen predecessors. HX laptop processors are basically Intel’s Raptor Lake desktop processors, repackaged to be soldered onto a laptop motherboard. Like these desktop processors, they all include additional electronic cores compared to 12th generation processors. The Core i9 processors and the i7-13850HX also support faster DDR5-5600 RAM, although the others stick to DDR5-4800.
Despite adding more E-cores, hardened cache, and increased peak clock speeds for both P-cores and E-cores, Intel’s base and turbo power figures remain the same as the CPUs 12th Gen, which hopefully means battery life won’t take a hit.
Moving down the stack, the H-, P-, and U-series processors don’t change much from their predecessors. They still max out 14 cores (six P-cores, eight E-cores), they have the same Iris Xe integrated GPUs, and they include the same amount of cache and the same base and turbo power specs as before. They officially support faster DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory speeds, and CPU and GPU clock speeds increase slightly over 12th Gen. But otherwise, these refreshes mostly run on water, and you shouldn’t expect a 13th-gen laptop if you can find an otherwise identical 12th-gen laptop for less.
A footnote for the U-series for connoisseurs of Intel’s branding efforts: the Intel U300 processor at the bottom of the stack would likely have been called a Pentium or Celeron processor in previous generations. But Intel said last year that it would be withdrawal of both brands in favor of the “Intel processor” in 2023.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a “Gold” or “Silver” modifier to tell you anything about the underlying architecture of the Intel processor you’re looking at; an Intel U300 processor is based on the Raptor Lake architecture and includes a single P core alongside its four E cores, but the Intel N-series processors that Intel also announced today do not have P cores and will feel quite a bit slower as a result.
All cheap laptop electronic cores
The latest processors introduced by Intel are aimed at low-end devices and replace the (now discontinued) N-series Celeron and Pentium processors of previous generations. The new Core i3-N chips and Intel N-series processors exclusively use the Gracemont E cores from the larger Alder and Raptor Lake chips, without the benefit of P cores for more demanding tasks.
Core i3 chips include a total of eight E-cores, while the Intel N100 and N200 processors both use four E-cores. All chips support LPDDR5, DDR5, and DDR4 memory, and all include integrated GPUs with 32 or 24 EU. Besides the number of cores, Core i3 chips have higher GPU clock speeds (1.25 GHz, compared to 750 MHz) and slightly higher power requirements than Intel processors.
Historically, these N-series processors have been disappointing, even in the context of budget laptops. But there’s reason to believe that these Gracemont-based processors could perform reasonably well in day-to-day use. Intel has always used the 2015 6th Gen Skylake chips as a benchmark for its E-cores, claiming that the E-cores perform about as well as Skylake, while using a fraction of the power. They’re pretty old, but the quad-core Skylake CPUs still feel great for browsing and office work. Hopefully the new N-series chips will raise the bar for the ultra-low budget laptops they usually end up in.
List image by Intel
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