At CES 2024, Intel took the stage to announce their latest refresh to the Intel Core-H series mobile processors targeted at gamers and content creators. The 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh HX-series mobile processors bring more performance and features without disturbing the power envelope.
The Core i9-14900HX leads the charge with its impressive 24 cores, making it the pinnacle of the HX-series chips designed to offer an unparalleled gaming experience on the go.
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Built on the Intel 7 node, the Raptor Lake refresh maintains its hybrid architecture, featuring Raptor Cove P-cores for performance and more power-efficient Gracemont E-cores for efficiency. While the core count remains constant for the Core i9 and Core i5 SKUs, Intel has enhanced the E-cores and L3 cache on the Core i7 models. This launch comprises five HX-series overclockable SKUs.
The Core i9-14900HX stands out with its 24-core, 32-thread configuration, boasting a 400 MHz higher P-core boost clock and a 200 MHz higher E-core boost clock compared to its predecessor, the Core i9-13900HX. Notably, the Core i7-14700HX and Core i7-14650HX are the only SKUs receiving core enhancements. Intel has expanded the Core i7-14700HX’s core count to 20 by adding four additional E-cores, coupled with increased boost clock speeds. Meanwhile, the Core i7-14650HX received two additional P-cores, totaling 16 cores—eight P-cores and eight E-cores. This alteration allowed for a moderate increase of 300 MHz in the P-core and 100 MHz in the E-core boost clock speeds while maintaining the same power specifications.
In contrast, the Core i5 models witnessed more restrained improvements. The Core i5-14500HX features a 200 MHz higher P-core boost clock than the Core i5-13500HX while retaining the same E-core boost clock. Similarly, the Core i5-14450HX exhibits marginal 200 MHz and 100 MHz enhancements in P-core and E-core boost clocks over the Core i5-13450HX.
The Intel Application Optimization (APO) is a part of the Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology framework that improves performance by dynamically allocating resources to applications in real-time to deliver the additional performance boost. Intel showed a demo of the APO, claiming a 4% to 18% performance boost in gaming. The APO is targeted essentially at improving gaming performance. At launch Intel APO will be supported by default for 8 gaming titles, however, a total of 14 games will make it to APO-ready by the next Intel line-up release. The good part is, that APO will be also supported by Intel 12th and 13th gen processors from the previous generation.
When asked about the secret sauce behind the Intel APO performance boost, Intel didn’t reveal all the intimate details, but they did give us some dope on how APO can shut down e-cores or even turn off hyperthreading for games that don’t play well with them.
Intel APO is to be installed as an application, downloaded from the Windows Store and the games need to be launched once so that the application detects the supported games and creates a profile in the APO interface.
When asked how the APO would impact battery life or the image quality fidelity, Intel assured us that there would be no hit on the image quality and the battery life would probably be better if not the same when running games with APO enabled.
On the feature front, the processors boast the latest Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity standards, along with Thunderbolt 5 support on select models. These processors also support various Intel technologies, including XTU (Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility), Speed Optimizer for one-click overclocking, and XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) SO-DIMMs. Memory support includes DDR5-5600 and DDR4-3200, with a maximum supported capacity of 192GB of DDR5 memory.
Over 60 new laptop designs from prominent brands such as HP, Acer, Alienware, Lenovo, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and Razer are expected to launch with the 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh HX-series processors in the upcoming year.
