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Intel Core i5-1250P vs Intel Core i7-1280P

Intel Core i5-1250P

► remove from comparison Intel i5-1250P

The Intel Core i5-1250P is a mid-range Alder Lake-P family SoC designed for use in ultra-light, ultra-thin (yet actively cooled) laptops. It was announced in early 2022 and it has 4 performance cores, as opposed to the 6 cores of the top-of-the-line i7-1280P (P-cores, Golden Cove architecture) mated to 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The i5's P-cores are Hyper-Threading-enabled for a total of 16 threads when combined with its E-cores. The clock speeds range from 1.7 GHz to 4.4 GHz for the performance cluster and 1.2 GHz to 3.3 GHz for the efficient cluster. The shortcomings of this processor as compared with the slightly faster Core i5-1260P include the smaller L3 cache, slower iGPU model, lower clock speeds. Full vPro feature set is enabled in the case of this i5, though ("Enterprise" tier, allowing for remote device management).

Architecture

The i5 is a continuation of Intel's efforts to use the ARM-developed big.LITTLE technology for its own benefit. A single "little" Alder Lake core is supposed to be as fast as a Skylake core (as found in the venerable Core i7-6700HQ among other options) which is six years old at this point. All of Core i5-1250P's CPU cores enjoy access to 12 MB of L3 cache. The integrated memory controller supports various memory types up to LPDDR5-5200, DDR5-4800, LPDDR4x-4267 or DDR4-3200; Intel recommends using no more than 64 GB, for reference. Just like the other 12th Gen Intel Core processors, this Core i5 comes with the Thread Director which is a new functionality designed to help Windows 11 decide which cores to use for what workload for best performance and efficiency possible. Hardware acceleration of AI algorithms is supported via GNA 3.0 and DL Boost (via AVX2). The alluringly fast PCI-Express 5.0 spec has not found its way into Alder Lake P processors, so users will have to be content with PCI-Express 4.0 for the time being. Four PCI-Express 4 lanes allow for a read/write rate of up to 7.9 GB/s, provided a suitably fast NVMe SSD is used.

Please note this is not a user-replaceable CPU. It gets permanently soldered on to the motherboard (FCBGA1744 socket interface).

Performance

The average 1250P in our database nearly matches the Ryzen 5 5500U and the Ryzen 5 PRO 6650U in multi-thread performance, trailing behind the Core i5-1240P just slightly. This is a great CPU for nearly all tasks imaginable, as long as one does not expect it to be as fast as the mighty Core i7-12700H.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the Power Limits are and how competent the cooling solution of your system is. The latter is really important as a single Golden Cove core can eat more than 20 W when under heavy load.

Graphics

The built-in graphics adapter in the form of the 80 EU Iris Xe running at up to 1.4 GHz has seen little change from what was built into certain 11th Gen Tiger Lake UP3 processors, like a Core i5-1135G7, which is hardly a downside as this iGPU is loaded with modern features, AV1 video decoding capability and SUHD 4320p monitor support included. The Xe isn't a stranger to a bit of casual gaming; that said, your mileage may vary depending on how high the Power Limits are and how capable the cooling solution of a laptop is. Expect something close to NVIDIA's MX250 or in other words, acceptable framerates in most games when playing at 1080p / Low settings. Fast RAM is a prerequisite for decent performance as the Xe has to make do with no dedicated video memory.

Power consumption

The i5's base power consumption (also known as the default TDP or Power Limit 1) is 28 W; its maximum Turbo power consumption (also known as the PL2) is not supposed to exceed 64 W. As for the "Minimum Assured" power consumption, Intel's guidelines mention 20 W. All in all, an active cooling solution is a must for a CPU like this.

The i5-1250P is built with Intel's fourth-gen 10 nm manufacturing process marketed as Intel 7 for decent, as of late 2022, energy efficiency. Despite that, the i5 is more power-hungry than certain 7 nm U-class AMD Ryzen 5000 chips delivering similar, or even higher, performance.

Intel Core i7-1280P

► remove from comparison Intel i7-1280P

The Intel Core i7-1280P is the flagship Alder Lake-P CPU, which is to say, an expensive 28 W part meant for use in ultra-light (yet actively cooled) laptops. This CPU was announced in early 2022 and it has 6 performance cores (P-cores, Golden Cove architecture) mated to 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The P-cores are Hyper-Threading-enabled for whopping 20 threads when combined with the E-cores. The clock speeds range from 1.8 GHz to 4.8 GHz for the performance cluster and 1.3 GHz to 3.6 GHz for the efficiency cluster. This is the only hexa-core 28 W Alder Lake CPU as of February 2022, trumping what the more affordable i7-1270P and i7-1260P have in store. Full vPro feature set is supported by this Core i7 ("Enterprise" tier, allowing for remote device management).

Architecture

The i7 is a continuation of Intel's efforts to use the ARM-developed big.LITTLE technology for its own benefit. A single "little" Alder Lake core is supposed to be just as fast as a Skylake core (as found in the venerable Core i7-6700HQ among other options) which is six years old at this point. All of a Core i7-1280P's CPU cores enjoy access to 24 MB of L3 cache. The integrated memory controller supports up to 64 GB of LPDDR5-5200, DDR5-4800, LPDDR4x-4267 or DDR4-3200 RAM. Just like the other 12th Gen Intel Core processors, Core i7-1280P comes with Thread Director which is a new functionality designed to help Windows 11 decide which cores to use for what workload for best performance and efficiency possible. Hardware acceleration of AI algorithms is supported via GNA 3.0 and DL Boost (via AVX2). PCI-Express 5.0 support has not found its way into Alder Lake P processors, so users will have to be content with PCI-Express 4.0 for the time being. Four PCI-Express 4 lanes allow for a read/write rate of up to 7.9 GB/s, provided a suitably fast NVMe SSD is used.

Please note this is not a user-replaceable CPU. It gets soldered permanently on to the motherboard (BGA1744 socket interface).

Performance

The average 1280P in our database delivers multi-thread benchmarks scores that are most similar to those of the Ryzen 9 5900HS, Ryzen 9 PRO 6950HS and also the Core i9-11980HK.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term CPU power limit of 80 W, the MSI Summit E16 Flip A12UDT-031 is among the fastest laptops built around the 1280P that we know of. It can be roughly 60% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Graphics

The built-in graphics adapter in the form of the 96 EU Iris Xe running at up to 1.45 GHz has seen no change from what was built into the 11th Gen Tiger Lake-UP3 processors, like a i7-1165G7, which is hardly a downside as this iGPU is loaded with modern features such as AV1 video decoding capability and SUHD 4320p monitor support. An Iris Xe Graphics G7 will let you use up to 4 monitors simultaneously, provided the laptop has the ports required.

The graphics adapter will let you play most games at 1080p / Medium settings to be very close to NVIDIA's MX350.

That being said, the Xe's gaming performance is bound to be tied to how high the Power Limits and how competent the cooling solution of a laptop are. Fast RAM is a prerequisite for decent performance as well (the Iris Xe has to make do with no dedicated video memory).

Last but not the least, we discovered that the GPU utilization when playing YouTube UHD 2160p60 videos is higher than it was with Tiger Lake chips.

Power consumption

The i7's base power consumption (also known as the default TDP value or the PL1) is 28 W, with 64 W being its maximum Intel-recommended Turbo power consumption (also known as the PL2). The "Minimum Assured" power consumption is fairly high at 20 watts. All in all, an active cooling solution is a must for a CPU like this.

The i7-1280P is built with Intel's fourth-gen 10 nm process marketed as Intel 7 for decent, as of late 2022, energy efficiency. This is still a rather power-hungry CPU; a single P-core will happily eat more than 20 W and even ask for more when under heavy load. A couple of higher-end 7 nm U-class AMD Ryzen 5000 chips are noticeably more modest than the i7 while delivering the same or higher performance levels.

ModelIntel Core i5-1250PIntel Core i7-1280P
SeriesIntel Alder Lake-PIntel Alder Lake-P
CodenameAlder Lake-PAlder Lake-P
Series: Alder Lake-P Alder Lake-P
Intel Core i7-1280P1.3 - 4.8 GHz14 / 20 cores24 MB L3
Intel Core i7-1270P compare1.6 - 4.8 GHz12 / 16 cores18 MB L3
Intel Core i7-1260P compare1.5 - 4.7 GHz12 / 16 cores18 MB L3
Intel Core i5-1250P « 1.2 - 4.4 GHz12 / 16 cores12 MB L3
Intel Core i5-1240P compare1.2 - 4.4 GHz12 / 16 cores12 MB L3
Intel Core i3-1220P compare1.1 - 4.4 GHz10 / 12 cores12 MB L3
Intel Core i7-1280P « 1.3 - 4.8 GHz14 / 20 cores24 MB L3
Intel Core i7-1270P compare1.6 - 4.8 GHz12 / 16 cores18 MB L3
Intel Core i7-1260P compare1.5 - 4.7 GHz12 / 16 cores18 MB L3
Intel Core i5-1250P1.2 - 4.4 GHz12 / 16 cores12 MB L3
Intel Core i5-1240P compare1.2 - 4.4 GHz12 / 16 cores12 MB L3
Intel Core i3-1220P compare1.1 - 4.4 GHz10 / 12 cores12 MB L3
Clock1200 - 4400 MHz1300 - 4800 MHz
L1 Cache1.1 MB1.2 MB
L2 Cache10 MB11.5 MB
L3 Cache12 MB24 MB
Cores / Threads12 / 1614 / 20
TDP28 Watt28 Watt
Technology10 nm10 nm
max. Temp.100 °C100 °C
SocketBGA1744BGA1744
FeaturesDDR4-3200/LPDDR4x-4266/DDR5-4800/LPDDR5-5200, PCIe 4, Thr. Director, DL Boost, GNA, Remote Platform Erase, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2, BMI2, ABM, FMA, ADX, SMEP, SMAP, EIST, TM1, TM2, HT, Turbo, SST, AES-NI, RDRAND, RDSEED, SHADDR4-3200/LPDDR4x-4266/DDR5-4800/LPDDR5-5200 RAM, PCIe 4, Thr. Director, DL Boost, GNA, Rem. Platf. Erase, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2, BMI2, ABM, FMA, ADX, SMEP, SMAP, EIST, TM1, TM2, HT, Turbo, SST, AES-NI, RDRAND, RDSEED, SHA
iGPUIntel Iris Xe Graphics G7 80EUs ( - 1400 MHz)Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 96EUs ( - 1450 MHz)
Architecturex86x86
Announced
Manufacturerark.intel.comark.intel.com

Benchmarks

Performance Rating - CB R15 + R20 + 7-Zip + X265 + Blender + 3DM11 CPU - i5-1250P
32 pt (44%)
Performance Rating - CB R15 + R20 + 7-Zip + X265 + Blender + 3DM11 CPU - i7-1280P
39.9 pt (55%)
Cinebench R23 - Cinebench R23 Multi Core
7282 Points (7%)
min: 8632     avg: 11685     median: 11666 (11%)     max: 14803 Points
Cinebench R23 - Cinebench R23 Single Core
1521 Points (65%)
min: 1609     avg: 1670     median: 1651 (70%)     max: 1787 Points
Cinebench R20 - Cinebench R20 CPU (Single Core)
536 Points (60%)
min: 615     avg: 642     median: 629 (70%)     max: 701 Points
Cinebench R20 - Cinebench R20 CPU (Multi Core)
2334 Points (6%)
min: 3283     avg: 4627     median: 4677.5 (11%)     max: 5415 Points
Cinebench R15 - Cinebench R15 CPU Multi 64 Bit
1528 Points (10%)
min: 1905     avg: 2120     median: 2112 (13%)     max: 2332 Points
Cinebench R15 - Cinebench R15 CPU Single 64 Bit
201 Points (61%)
min: 203     avg: 237.3     median: 238 (72%)     max: 258 Points
Cinebench R11.5 - Cinebench R11.5 CPU Multi 64 Bit
9.7 Points (13%)
25.2 Points (33%)
Cinebench R11.5 - Cinebench R11.5 CPU Single 64 Bit
2.7 Points (68%)
3.1 Points (76%)
Cinebench R10 - Cinebench R10 Rend. Single (32bit)
7918 Points (48%)
8881 Points (54%)
Cinebench R10 - Cinebench R10 Rend. Multi (32bit)
38277 Points (28%)
46007 Points (33%)
Cinebench R10 - Cinebench R10 Rend. Multi (64bit)
70566 Points (49%)
Cinebench R10 - Cinebench R10 Rend. Single (64bit)
14362 Points (17%)
wPrime 2.10 - wPrime 2.0 1024m *
340 s (4%)
1168 s (14%)
wPrime 2.10 - wPrime 2.0 32m *
9.6 s (2%)
34 s (7%)
wPrime 1.55 - wPrime 1.55 1024m *
1165 s (5%)
wPrime 1.55 - wPrime 1.55 32m *
28 s (15%)
WinRAR - WinRAR 4.0
5561 Points (9%)
7082 Points (11%)
7-Zip 18.03 - 7-Zip 18.03 Multli Thread 4 runs
24625 MIPS (14%)
min: 45292     avg: 49730     median: 49572 (28%)     max: 53710 MIPS
7-Zip 18.03 - 7-Zip 18.03 Single Thread 4 runs
3532 MIPS (42%)
min: 4995     avg: 5488     median: 5540 (66%)     max: 5874 MIPS
X264 HD Benchmark 4.0 - x264 Pass 2
79.6 fps (28%)
X264 HD Benchmark 4.0 - x264 Pass 1
201.1 fps (46%)
HWBOT x265 Benchmark v2.2 - HWBOT x265 4k Preset
6.8 fps (12%)
min: 9.62     avg: 12.5     median: 12.9 (23%)     max: 14.5 fps
TrueCrypt - TrueCrypt Serpent
1 GB/s (0%)
1.2 GB/s (0%)
TrueCrypt - TrueCrypt Twofish
1.9 GB/s (33%)
2.1 GB/s (36%)
TrueCrypt - TrueCrypt AES
9.5 GB/s (25%)
11.8 GB/s (31%)
Blender - Blender 3.3 Classroom CPU *
min: 490     avg: 566     median: 537 (7%)     max: 741 Seconds
Blender - Blender 2.79 BMW27 CPU *
511 Seconds (4%)
min: 259     avg: 281.7     median: 285 (2%)     max: 309 Seconds
R Benchmark 2.5 - R Benchmark 2.5 *
0.6 sec (13%)
min: 0.4505     avg: 0.5     median: 0.5 (10%)     max: 0.512 sec
3DMark 06 - CPU - 3DMark 06 - CPU
11842 Points (25%)
6579 Points (14%)
Super Pi mod 1.5 XS 1M - Super Pi mod 1.5 XS 1M *
8.4 s (2%)
7 s (2%)
Super Pi mod 1.5 XS 2M - Super Pi mod 1.5 XS 2M *
18.5 s (1%)
16 s (1%)
Super Pi Mod 1.5 XS 32M - Super Pi mod 1.5 XS 32M *
461.5 s (2%)
366 s (2%)
3DMark 11 - 3DM11 Performance Physics
11666 Points (32%)
min: 11415     avg: 15372     median: 15372.5 (42%)     max: 18478 Points
3DMark - 3DMark Cloud Gate Physics
9084 Points (23%)
min: 7264     avg: 12588     median: 12154 (31%)     max: 17047 Points
3DMark - 3DMark Fire Strike Standard Physics
16016 Points (29%)
min: 15398     avg: 19695     median: 19017.5 (34%)     max: 25756 Points
3DMark - 3DMark Time Spy CPU
3227 Points (14%)
min: 6205     avg: 8459     median: 7672.5 (32%)     max: 12031 Points
Geekbench 5.5 - Geekbench 5.1 - 5.4 64 Bit Single-Core
1622 Points (68%)
min: 1571     avg: 1701     median: 1746 (74%)     max: 1802 Points
Geekbench 5.5 - Geekbench 5.1 - 5.4 64 Bit Multi-Core
7672 Points (14%)
min: 9623     avg: 10839     median: 11191 (20%)     max: 11811 Points
Geekbench 5.0 - Geekbench 5.0 64 Bit Single-Core
1583 Points (7%)
min: 1685     avg: 1706     median: 1694 (7%)     max: 1738 Points
Geekbench 5.0 - Geekbench 5.0 64 Bit Multi-Core
8778 Points (28%)
min: 9886     avg: 10561     median: 10537 (33%)     max: 11260 Points
Geekbench 4.4 - Geekbench 4.1 - 4.4 64 Bit Single-Core
7072 Points (71%)
7522 Points (75%)
Geekbench 4.4 - Geekbench 4.1 - 4.4 64 Bit Multi-Core
35532 Points (40%)
40196 Points (45%)
Mozilla Kraken 1.1 - Kraken 1.1 Total Score *
734 ms (1%)
min: 526     avg: 563     median: 538 (1%)     max: 683 ms
Sunspider - Sunspider 1.0 Total Score *
95.5 ms (1%)
Octane V2 - Octane V2 Total Score
min: 83104     avg: 84579     median: 84578.5 (76%)     max: 86053 Points
WebXPRT 4 - WebXPRT 4 Score
min: 232     avg: 247.2     median: 248.5 (71%)     max: 257 Points
WebXPRT 3 - WebXPRT 3 Score
254 Points (53%)
min: 203     avg: 271.3     median: 286 (60%)     max: 290 Points
CrossMark - CrossMark Overall
1554 Points (60%)
min: 1652     avg: 1704     median: 1690 (65%)     max: 1773 Points
Power Consumption - Prime95 Power Consumption - external Monitor *
32.2 Watt (6%)
min: 40.8     avg: 56.1     median: 54.3 (9%)     max: 73.4 Watt
Power Consumption - Cinebench R15 Multi Power Consumption - external Monitor *
45.5 Watt (8%)
min: 45.3     avg: 65.3     median: 65.1 (12%)     max: 90.7 Watt
Power Consumption - Idle Power Consumption - external Monitor *
min: 3.08     avg: 8.5     median: 8.7 (6%)     max: 13.6 Watt
Power Consumption - Idle Power Consumption 150cd 1min *
min: 4.07     avg: 10.5     median: 10.2 (11%)     max: 17.4 Watt
Power Consumption - Cinebench R15 Multi Power Efficiency - external Monitor
33.6 Points per Watt (25%)
min: 25.7     avg: 32.6     median: 30.3 (23%)     max: 46.8 Points per Watt

Average Benchmarks Intel Core i5-1250P → 100% n=38

Average Benchmarks Intel Core i7-1280P → 128% n=38

- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
* Smaller numbers mean a higher performance
1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation

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v1.26
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#11 min, max, avg, median took s +0.259s ... 0.386s

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Redaktion, 2017-09- 8 (Update: 2023-07- 1)