Intel’s Core i9-12950HX has 16 cores and 55 watts of power

Don't be sad, since intel changed from a engineering to a pure money-making firm, it went downhill...they deserve it. So many shady things, blatantly lying to customers and faking benchmarks.

I hope they are a getting beaten down until they realize that the are an engineer firm, and if the US is smart, they eventually take over Intel -> "country important products"

Intel - From Inventors of the CPU to Laughing Stock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH2nXMv6yZI

Not sad at all. I am glad to see that the market place is working. Punishing companies like Intel that decided to focus more on top management enrichment than quality products. Intel had the chance to do the iPhone CPU and turned it down. Intel was the #1 chip manufacturer in the world but ended up falling behind. Intel had the chance to be the #1 ARM manufacturer in the world but decided not to. And yet the Intel CEO’s who made these decision were all rewarded with massive bonuses. So much for accountability.

Laptop OEMs like Eluktronics or XMG have been putting desktop chips in laptops since forever. Have you checked them out? Sounds exactly what you need.

I have not felt the need for a very fast laptop given reasonable internet. I just do any heavy computation (builds etc.) on a remote server.

You don't. You need better software.

Unless you're encoding video or compiling kernels 24/7 on your local machine.

This is the equivalent of asking for a faster horse instead of a car.

someone should make cloud desktops for this sort of thing?

Why? This exact class of powerful Intel chips were placed in MacBook Pros before the M1 and those were not exactly niche nor workstation class.

Which shouldn’t be niche these days. What developer (for example) doesn’t sit 8h per day 98 days of 100 plugged into a wall socket and using external keyboard/screen?

Seems it would be a more common laptop use case than actual mobile use.

In fact, the de facto upper limit for laptop batteries is 100 watt hours since this is the largest battery size permitted on a flight by the FAA (the US air travel regulatory body) without special approval [1]. The CPU would drain such a battery in 1 hour and 50 minutes.

[1]: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...

It's even worse. The Max turbo power on these CPUs is 157W. So if the cooling can keep up these will draw much more than 55W.

I like that. I work on algorithmic performance, making the big-oh notation better often accompanied by a better hidden constant (both at the same time), and I would say...

Waiting for a machine is considered harmful. You are never to wait for your machine, it ought to wait for you. You yes want it running at 1% or so. Then it's at your beck and call, ready to fire up at a moment's notice. Instead of the other way around, you planning your schedule around the machine's work. I've done that, there's problems with this, for instance experiments failing half-way while I was out on a walk. I think one time I left it running overnight, that's a classic.

But if the computer can go all-out for 110 minutes, that's good, means it's a good sprinter, that's actually better than a good marathoner for the type of mathematical experiments typically carried out on a laptop. And for the laptop? Nobody cares about the energy efficiency when it's working hard. Then you plug it in. Or you think the problem over harder.

Like I've never had to do a long mathematical experiment without connecting to the wall. In 13 years as an algorithmist, doing all kinds of shit, not one time. Because then you can't use it for listening to music, or writing essays on Hacker News, or applying to anything, or using emacs. I guess the reason for that is lack of will, so that 110 minutes according to a child node of this poster is much less on an older battery, like 60% of that, so 66 minutes. Then, don't assume I start out on a full charge, I have to code up the algo first, that takes a lot of time at low intensity, a lot of battery, plus you have to finish up the experiment properly, save some files before shutting down. So I guess if you were allotted a limited amount of charge overnight and that's all you could use, then sure. Plus the TDP is lower than if you do really fucked up things with the cores, one time the jumping I think would use up more than TDP. I think I've broken the conceivable limit on one chip, one chip for sure. They assumed my algorithms were sane, reasonable, that's where they fucked up. And all these considerations, I could brainstorm more, but all the considerations reduce the effective battery. Nothing makes it bigger again, it's all a drain. Even writing about the drain like I am now causes drain, accounting for accounting should be accounted for in the total. In other words the Silva Paradox https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... . In practice I behave totally differently on eg an airplane trip with limited battery than plugged into the wall. Might as well get another user account on everything, full on Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde with power versus battery.

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And I had fucking old old batteries most of the time, my laptop was only a supercomputer due to algorithms, not software or hardware. Only a few of the algorithms were that good yet, when I had it, so in practice I couldn't say it was truly a supercomputer like this machine. Single thread, dual core, like a crappy plastic Macbook. It got looks at Stanford because your laptop is always visible in class (pre-covid) and a status symbol. Well mine was becoming the best, under the hood. And I did all sorts of stunts on it. It's not meaningfully different than now, that was 2.0 GHz, this is less than 3.0 GHz, clock speed for me is still king. Well I guess it depends. Yeah so in fact because of the clock speed factor, your experiments will run on one core usually, I wonder how that compares with the assumptions that lead to a 55W TDP.

I’d pay good money for a 5kg laptop without any battery at all.

I just need a computer I can move between the office and home.

I don’t need a screen, keyboard or touchpad either. They are a bonus (for meetings, for example) but I’d trade them away for a more powerful cpu any day.

Who cares? MBPs will never see this CPU anyway. Assuming that a CPU is at 100% TDP all the time is a bit naif, too.

Intel's efficient cores are not like the little cores of a big.LITTLE. They are still very potent CPU cores in their own right. We're still talking out-of-order cores & all that jazz ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels... ).

If you have a multithreaded workload that can actually hammer that many cores, you will get decent scaling out of them ( https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Intel-12th-Gen---... )

Don't forget workstation laptops that are basically always plugged in.

With severe throttling it might become an energy efficient but slow chip when needed.

This is kind of a rebrand of the 12900K so it didn't cost much to develop. They have P class and H class processors for laptops that you could actually use on your lap.

The fact that it can draw a ton of power doesn't make it "power hungry".

The low-power CPUs already launched first. That's what the prioritized, and are already showing up in thin & lights like the XPS 13 Plus ( https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptops/new-xps-13-plus/spd/... ).

These power-hungry variants are the last of the lineup to be released.

Gaming and desktop replacement. Plenty of people basically move their laptop between a desk at home and a desk at work.

In SFF PCs like the NUC this makes a lot of sense.

No, at full speed it consumes 175W.