Intel’s Core i9-12900HK Is More Powerful Than Ryzen 9 5980HX and M1 Max, to the Surprise of Many

The first Geekbench 5 run of Intel’s Core i9-12900HK has just been spotted online and, frankly, it’s absolutely mind-blowing! We knew Alder Lake was going to deliver in one way or another, but no one could’ve foreseen such tremendous gains — especially not after so many years of stagnation from Intel.

The outlook seemed quite grim for “team blue” which is why this latest bit of news comes as a wholly positive surprise. We’re not partial to Intel whatsoever, but a more competitive market — one in which innovation comes first — will benefit us the most. It means lower prices, better products, and more value across the board.

There also seems to be quite an important battle in the mobility segment of the market as all three tech giants (Intel, AMD, and Apple) want to have the final word when it comes to both thin-and-light ultrabooks and high-performance “pro” laptops.

Intel was always going to face an uphill battle, but if this latest Core i9-12900HK benchmark is anything to go by, we might have counted them out prematurely.

Core i9-12900HK — An Absolute Mobility Powerhouse

With 1,851 points in single- and 13,256 points in multi-core, the i9-12900HK (14 cores, 20 threads) is an absolute behemoth, and it’s even more powerful than Apple’s M1 Max and AMD’s Ryzen 9 5980HX, both of which are obscenely powerful processors. Better yet, users will be able to eke out even more performance seeing how this is an HK processor and is, therefore, overclockable.

The mobile Alder Lake-P series from Intel will no doubt leave a mark, and while this particular CPU might be extremely power hungry (basically a given at this point), it’s still nice to see it register such high scores in the face of the most immense competition.

Intel needed a home run so as to stand a chance against AMD and Apple, and while Alder Lake might not be the most efficient series of processors on the market, it’ll at least bring respectable single-core performance and will narrow the gap between it and AMD’s Ryzen.

While that’s not exactly a spectacular achievement per se, it is nonetheless the best Intel could’ve done and is more than enough for “team blue” to remain relevant. These processors are expected to hit the market in just a couple of months, so stay tuned for more coverage!