Intel is looking to deliver a big performance boost with its new ultraportable Alder Lake U and P-series chips, unveiled last week. The Core i7-1280P, Intel’s fastest 28-watt P-series CPU, is said to deliver up to 70 percent faster multithreaded performance compared to last year’s i7-1195G7. Intel says it even offers better multithread benchmarks than the Core i9-11980HK, one of the company’s fastest 2021 processors. This, despite the fact that it uses only about half as much power. According to some tests, the Intel i7-1280P also bested AMD’s 2021 Ryzen 7 5800U.

AMD is preparing to come out with its new Ryzen 6000 chips. Intel’s U and P-series chips “could offer enough power to play a few games and give Apple’s custom processors some serious competition,” writes Engadget, noting that “like the rest of its 12th-gen lineup, Intel’s U and P-series chips are a new hybrid design that combines Performance cores (P-cores) and Efficient cores (E-cores) on a single die.”

The architecture “combines performance and efficiency cores to maximize both power and battery life,” according to The Verge.

The i7-1280P is a 14-core chip — consisting of six P-cores and eight E-cores —maxing out at 4.8GHz on its P-cores. “Its 28-watt base power consumption puts it in thin and light territory, but it can scale up to 64-watts to reach Max Turbo speeds” when it’s plugged-in, Engadget says.

While the hybrid design “is clearly a leap forward for the P-series CPUs,” with the i7-1280P about 20 percent faster than 2001’s chips per he Crossmark test, “we’re still waiting to see how the U-series chips will compare,” says Engadget, noting “it’s surprising that Intel still isn’t saying much about U-series performance, but we’d wager there would be a significant speed bump from the architecture changes alone.”

At CES 2022, Intel launched the 12th Gen Alder Lake H-series chips for power-mad laptops. The 12th-gen CPUs for laptop utilize Intel’s Xe graphics. According to Intel, the i7-1280P hits 82fps while playing “Grand Theft Auto V” and 53fps in “Chorus” using medium graphics in 1080p. Using higher-quality settings the chip climbs to 115fps for the  less demanding “League of Legends” and “Rocket League” (81 fps).

Separately, Yahoo Finance reports that AMD’s market cap last week surpassed Intel’s — $188 billion versus $182 billion — for the second time in a week. One reason for the change, AMD last week finalized its $35 billion purchase of Xilinx. The acquisition, the largest ever for the 53-year-old AMD, “gives the company significant expertise in the programmable chip market” useful for cloud computing and data centers.