Intel has just launched its latest 9th Gen Intel Core mobile H-series processors, taking aim at the gaming, professional, and desktop replacement markets once again with Coffee Lake. Incorporating the same architecture, process, and many of the same proprietary features as past generations, not much has changed with the 9th Gen. But Intel has managed to stuff these chips with two extra cores and WiFi 6 support to make them a little more tempting to users on ageing laptops.
The company is stepping up its 9th Gen mobile chips to match the desktop counterparts, offering up to eight cores and 16 threads with the top chip, the Core i9 9980HK. The processor is listed at 4.8GHz with Intel Turbo Boost activated, matching the hexacore i9 8950HK from last year. However, Intel is also touting the ability to run this octacore chip at 5GHz, pending thermal and power headroom, thanks to its Intel Thermal Velocity Boost tech.
Also hoping to sway users towards an upgrade, these chips all come rocking the WiFi 6 AX200. This is a wireless network adapter capable of sustaining reliable, high-speed WiFi with compatible routers even if the airwaves are packed with other network chatter.
All in all, Intel is touting some chunky performance bumps over 6th Gen Skylake chips during the company’s own in-house benchmarking. It puts the octacore i9 9980HK some 56% faster than the quad core i7 6700HQ in Total War: Warhammer, 38% faster turn times in Civ 6, and significantly more capable for streaming and recording. Apples and oranges, for sure, but the target audience for these chips will be users updating from half-decade old laptops.
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Given the Coffee Lake basis for the new chips, improvements over 8th Gen mobile processors are likely to be minimal beyond select applications that massively favour higher core counts.
But we can expect a healthy slew of laptops from the usual names and faces – fitted with 9th Gen chips from diddy i3s all the way up to ultra high-end i9s. Acer, Dell, Asus, HP, Razer, Lenovo, and MSI have all announced laptops built upon the 9th Gen today.
We managed to get a sneak peek of Asus’ spring 2019 gaming laptop lineup before launch, which is full to the brim with 240Hz panels and thin and light streaming laptops – many of them powered by Nvidia’s recently announced mobile 16-series too.
That’s because today also marks the launch of Nvidia’s GTX 1650 and mobile 16-series GPUs. These are already being fitted across the board alongside Intel and AMD’s latest processors, which is making for quite a mean duo at the right price.