CPU confusion made buying a laptop in 2022 a nightmare

There is nothing wrong with creating a tiering where products are designed and priced to meet the specific needs of users. Car manufacturers are experts at this, with less expensive cars meeting basic needs and luxury cars for those who have the means to enjoy the best automotive technology has to offer. In 2022, however, CPU makers screwed it up, creating a confusing mess that made choosing a laptop harder than it should have been. And by “CPU manufacturers”, we mainly mean Intel.

Don’t get me wrong: Intel’s 12th-gen product lines make sense on paper. There are low power chips to save energy and costs and high power chips to maximize performance at a premium price. But when placed on actual laptops, the distinction was much less clear than it should have been.

It’s so complicated

Let’s start with an overview of how the lineup was supposed to work. We’ll focus on two specs here, though there are many more we could consider. First is base processor power, or simply put, the amount of power a CPU consumes during normal operation. Second is the number of cores and threads, which with Intel’s 12th generation follows a BIG.little configuration where there is a mix of performance cores for demanding tasks and efficient cores for less power-hungry lesser tasks.

It’s also worth noting that the higher the numerical designation within the same base series, such as a Core i7-1255U vs. a Core i7-1265U, the higher the maximum turbo frequency and top speed.

Intel has stratified the lineup into three basic levels, as outlined in the following table:

Series	minimum watts	max watts	Minimum Cores/Threads	Max Cores/Threads
U-series	9 watts	15 watts	6 cores (two performance, four efficient), 8 threads	10 cores (two performance, eight efficient), 12 threads
P-series	28 watts	28 watts	10 cores (two performance, eight efficient), 12 threads	14 cores (six performance, eight efficient), 20 threads
H-series	45 watts	45 watts	8 cores (four performance, four efficient), 12 threads	14 cores (six performance, eight efficient), 20 threads
HX-series	55 watts	55 watts	12 cores (four performance, eight efficient), 16 threads	16 cores (eight performance, eight efficient), 24 threads

For the most part, you’ll find U-series and P-series CPUs in the thinnest, lightest laptops, and H-series CPUs in the biggest, heaviest laptops designed for the fastest performance. The HX-series CPUs, of which we’ve only reviewed a single laptop, the MSI GT77 Titan, they represent the top of the line in terms of processor speed and typically find their way into gaming laptops. And as far as we know, this is exactly how alignment is supposed to be used.

However, when I’ve reviewed many 12th-gen laptops, I’ve noticed that manufacturers have used a varied assortment of CPUs in different form factors. Most interesting has been the use of H-series CPUs in what would normally be considered thin and light ultrabooks. And when comparing performance between U-series and P-series laptops, the supposedly lower-powered CPUs have held their own.

In fact, it may be unfair to criticize Intel for the way it designed its chips, and more accurately to say that manufacturers have used the chips in less efficient facilities. But Intel has to bear at least some of the blame for creating such a complicated strain of CPU.

And what were the results?

This is just a small variety, but we can see that performance doesn’t always track CPU. For example, him Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip performed better in Geekbench 5 and Cinebench R23 tests than the Dell XPS 13 Plus with its faster CPU, though the Dell fared better in the Handbrake test. The second slowest CPU on this list, the Core i7-1250U in the HP Envy x360 13it performed better in Handbrake and Cinebench R23 than the Core i7-1265U in the HP Dragonfly Folio G3.

And, generally speaking, the U-series and P-series processors were within a hair’s breadth of each other in terms of performance. You need to move up to the H-series CPUs to see significant performance improvements. Even then, a laptop like the slim lenovo 9i with a Core i7-1260P it scored similar to H-series laptops in this comparison group. And when we look at the PCMark 10 Complete benchmark that analyzes a variety of productivity, media, and creativity tasks, the results are all over the place.

I’d love to point out that battery life followed each CPU’s power rating, but there are too many variables to come to that conclusion. Laptops have different battery capacities, displays that consume more or less power, and general settings, which are more influential on battery life than the CPU. But I can say this: I haven’t seen a strong correlation that buying a laptop with a lower-powered CPU automatically results in better battery life.

What does this all mean?