Hybrid architecture at 28W. | Intel Alder Lake Core i7-1260P - The 12th Generation of Mobile CPUs in Review

The new Intel Core i7-1260P is one chip from the new P-series with a TDP of 28 Watts and it also uses a hybrid architecture. Four fast performance cores (up to 4.7 GHz) with Hyperthreading support are accompanied by eight efficiency cores, so the chip can execute up to 16 threads simultaneously. The integrated GPU did not change and you still get the familiar Iris Xe Graphics with 96 EUs at a slightly higher clock of 1.4 GHz. The chip is manufactured in the Intel 7 process (10 nm). Compared to the slightly faster Core i7-1270P (+100 MHz), the 1260P does not support all the vPro features.

We review the new Core i7-1260P in Lenovo's Yoga 9i 14 convertible with generous TDP limits of 64W in short-term load scenarios and 38W under sustained workloads, so it should be one of the fastest versions of the new Core i7.

Intel's new Alder Lake mobile processors finally offer adequate multi-core performance and there is a significant performance increase over the aging quad-core CPUs from the Tiger Lake generation. Intel also managed to reduce the gap to the AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs with Zen 3 cores, but we cannot yet evaluate the performance compared to the new Ryzen 6000 chips at this point. Intel is still playing catch-up with Apple's M1 CPUs, which offer more performance in multi-core tests and consume less power at the same time.

The single-core results are excellent thanks to the new performance cores, but it comes at the cost of a high power consumption of around 26W. AMD and especially Apple are much more efficient here. The high power consumption also results in a problem when you use your laptop for daily stuff, which is evident in the case of the Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 (review will be published soon). Even short peak load scenarios result in high chip temperatures, so the fans start spinning really quickly.

The increasing number of CPUs with the new P-series is another problem. There have already been massive performance differences for the old U-series chips over the last couple of years due to different implementations and the manufacturer can once again pretty much do what they want. Even the new U-series chips can consume up to 55W (P-series up to 64W), so there might be laptops where a supposedly faster Core i7-1260P is actually slower than an Alder Lake-U due to TDP settings. This just makes its much more difficult for consumers to find the right chip or get an idea of the performance.