It's CES, and if you keep track of these things, you know that that means it's time for big announcements from PC hardware manufacturers. Intel is unveiling its entire 13th-gen lineup. While its unlocked K-series is already on the market for gamers, now it's time to take a look at the parts that will go inside of ultrabooks, gaming laptops, mainstream desktops, and more.
“The 13th Gen Intel Core mobile processor family delivers unrivaled, scalable performance for leadership platforms across all laptop segments,” said Michelle Johnston Holthaus, executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group at Intel. “With our industry-leading technologies and unmatched global partner ecosystem, people can expect a high-caliber mobile experience in new and unique form factors so they can game or create from anywhere.”
The new Intel 13th-gen mobile lineup
Most of the 13th-gen mobile lineup isn't too different from 12th-gen. The U-series, P-series, and H-series, boasting stats like a 10% boost in productivity performance. The biggest change in mobile is actually coming from the HX series.
HX was first introduced with 12th-gen, and it actually showed up in mid-2022. Now, it's part of the main lineup and it's where Intel's focus seems to be. HX comes with a 55W TDP, making it nearly as powerful as S-series desktop processors. These aren't just boosted H-series processors either. Intel 13th-gen HX processors offer up to 24 cores and 32 threads (8 P-cores and 16 E-cores), and up to 5.6GHz turbo frequency. Intel is still boasting support for DDR4, being that AMD is getting rid of it, promising up to 128GB DDR5 (up to 5,600MHz) or DDR4 (up to 3,200MHz). Also, all HX SKUs are unlocked for overclocxking.
Here's the full range:
Given that Intel's mobile processors are pretty iterative aside from the 55W HX chips, you're going to see a lot of gaming laptop vendors talk about using these parts at the show this week. In fact, Intel says there are five times as many 13th-gen HX laptops as there were 12th-gen, a figure that's surely a win for Intel, but also not surprising given the timing of 12th-gen HX.
And then we have the regular 45W H-series, the 28W P-series, and the 15W U-series. If you look at the cores and the graphics, you'll see that these are similar to last year's SKUs.
You'll also notice that while HX stands out, the H-series and P-series processors are more similar in terms of core count and graphics. The HX-series processors actually have lesser graphics before they're designed to be used with dedicated graphics, something Intel seems to be abandoning in its 45W chips.
The one thing that's really interesting about this from Intel's blog post is that it said that some laptops will come with Intel's Movidius vision processing unit, or what it's calling a VPU (basically what the rest of the industry calls an NPU). This is going to being Windows Studio Effects to Intel PCs, whereas previously it was limited to Snapdragon PCs.
Also, Intel is bringing its new Unison app to the world. This lets you send and receive texts from your PC, send and receive files, and more, and unlike Microsoft's own Phone Link, it works with iPhones as well as Android.
Rounding out the 13th-gen desktop lineup
As mentioned above, Intel debuted its 13th-gen lineup in the way that it always does, with its most powerful CPUs that are aimed at gamers. Now, it's time to show off the 65W parts. These ones aren't unlocked for overclocking, but they're still plenty powerful.
They max out at 24 cores and 32 threads, just like the HX mobile chips, and they get max turbo frequencies of up to 5.6GHz. Naturally, they come in their standard variants and the less expansive F-series variants, the latter of which doesn't have integrated graphics.
A big change actually comes to the four Core i5 SKUs. With 12th-gen, Intel actually didn't use any E-cores in its Core i5 models, except for in the unlocked K-series. With 13th-gen, Intel is giving its Core i5 SKUs the hybrid architecture love, with models that have either 10 or 14 cores, and either 16 or 20 threads.
Intel is also announcing its 13th-gen T-series processors, which are 35W lifestyle processors.
Whatever happened to Intel Pentium and Celeron?
Not too long ago, Intel killed off its Pentium and Celeron brands, replacing them with the more generic Intel Processor. If you looked closely at the U-series table above, then you've already spotted Intel Processor U300, a Lakefield-esque (oh no, I said the L-word) chip that has five cores and only one P-core.
There's also a new N-series, which includes some processors under the Intel Processor umbrella, and come that are actually branded as Core i3.
All of these processors are using Gracemont cores, built on the Intel 7 node. That also means that none of the four SKUs have any P-cores, but Intel is still promising big performance gains. The company says the new N-series gets 28% better application performance and 64% better graphics performance over the previous generation. On top of that, the Core i3 SKUs gets 42% better application performance and 56% better graphics performance than the Intel Processor SKUs.
Intel didn't provide a timeline for when these products are going to actually ship. Frankly, it doesn't really have to. It's CES, and every single laptop OEM is going to announce new products that use these processors.