Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake chips for thin and light laptops announced

Intel has launched the first wave of 12th Gen Alder Lake chipsets. The series was announced at CES 2022 but the H-series was made official back then. Now, the company has announced the rest of teh series comprising the P-series and U-series.
The new chipsets are aimed at powering more affordable thin and light laptops in 2022. There are a total of 20 chipsets announced under the P series, U series (15W) and U series (9W). The first laptops with the new Intel chips are set to arrive from March 2022.

The new chips also feature Intel’s Iris Xe graphics, along with support for WiFi 6E, Thunderbolt 4, and PCIe 4.0, but no HDMI 2.1. The new chips will also be a part of Intel’s Evo standard (gen 3) which will mean new 1080p webcam and WiFi 6E networking along with other battery and fast charging requirements.
Similar to the H-series, the new P and U series chips have more cores than the 11th gen Intel chipsets that we saw last year. Intel claims that the 12th Gen chips push out better performance with 70 per cent better multi-thread performance compared to 11th Gen.

Intel also claims that the new chips beat the Apple M1 and M1 Pro and AMD’s Ryzen R7 5800U in benchmarks testing tasks like web browsing and photo editing. However, the company didn’t mention the M1 Max.
Meanwhile the 28W models are now a separate P series this year unlike 11th Gen when they were a part of the U-series. The P series chips draw lesser power compared to the H series but offer similar specifications like the number of cores, but with lower clock speeds and performance.
The Core i7 1280P for instance has 14 cores (six performance cores and eight efficiency cores), just like the top i7 chips in the H-series. Meanwhile the new U series chips are just two performance cores across the whole lineup.