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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

Interesting choice to double down on a power hungry chip when targeting mobile. Personally I would prioritise battery life and a quiet laptop above other considerations. But perhaps the gaming laptop segment they’re targeting is big enough that it makes sense?

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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.

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.

>This is kind of a rebrand of the 12900K so it didn't cost much to develop

More correct would be binning instead of rebranding, and no, better binned chips do cost more to weed out from the rest of the silicon, regardless of being identical in design to the rest of the (cheaper) chips, since they can clock higher within the same power envelope due to winning the silicon fab lottery.

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

my work laptop's CPU sucks 45W: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/201837/...

lasts about 90 minutes when not plugged in (it also has a nvidia card to drive a bunch of monitors). is basically only not-plugged in while checking a quick e-mail or something. i have USB-C bricks and cables scattered throughout the house. doesn't particularly bother me.

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

The mobile workstations which use such CPUs have usually also a much higher idle power consumption, not only a much higher peak power consumption, in comparison with low-power laptops.

For example, my laptop is an older Dell Precision mobile workstation, with a Skylake mobile Xeon, 32 GB ECC RAM and an NVIDIA Quadro GPU.

It has an idle power consumption of 25 W (with the screen light being on), which means that even when staying idle the battery would last only 4 hours (with the screen light off the battery would obviously last longer, but the 4 hour limit would be valid e.g. when I would just use the laptop to read documents).

In this Dell mobile workstation, the CPU power limit for infinite time is set to 60 W, even if that laptop CPU has a nominal TDP of 45 W. Unlike in thinner laptops, in such a mobile workstation the CPU can indeed dissipate continuously for an indefinite time 60 W without throttling. Taking into account the power consumption of the remainder of the laptop, when running at 100% CPU utilization, the battery will be drained in less than an hour.

The new Alder Lake i9-12950HX will be used in the new mobile workstations Dell Precision 7670 and Dell Precision 7770.

These might have a lower idle power consumption than my older model, but I doubt that it will be less than 20 W, when also having a discrete NVIDIA GPU and 64 GB RAM.

I expect that the steady-state CPU maximum power consumption will also be higher than the nominal 55 W TDP, maybe at 65 W, while the turbo power consumption of i9-12950HX is 157 W, according to the rumors.

The other mobile workstation vendors, e.g. Lenovo, HP, MSI, will have similar models.

Well yes, there's not going to be a free lunch. 64GB of ECC DDR4 is likely to consume 24W all by itself. This has basically nothing to do with the choice of CPU.

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.

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

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