Intel announced its first batch of Alder Lake mobile CPUs at CES 2022 this week, and claims that at least one of them can deliver performance comparable to Apple's M1 Max chip.

This is an important claim. This is an important claim, since Intel's long reign as the top dog in the CPU market (with AMD fiercely competing) was overtaken last year by the impressive performance and efficiency of Apple's custom-made silicon. MacBook Pro outperformed most of the Windows notebooks we tested.

Intel released a handful of Alder Lake CPUs late last year, but they were desktop chips; we had to wait until now to learn the power that Alder Lake mobile CPUs will unleash when they start appearing in laptops this year.

What makes these chips particularly exciting is that they are built on a hybrid architecture. That is, there is a high-power performance core and a group of lower-performance, higher-efficiency cores on each chip, controlled by a new embedded microcontroller called the Intel Thread Director, which intelligently manages the workflow across all cores to achieve optimal performance.

Apple silicon like the M1 Pro and M1 Max employ a similar hybrid architecture with high-performance and high-efficiency CPU cores on a single chip. In fact, Apple goes a step further by putting a multi-core GPU on the same chip, allowing both the CPU and GPU to access the same shared unified memory pool.

The star of Intel's exhibit today is the Core i9-12900HKCPU. With 14 cores (6 performance and 8 efficiency cores) capable of achieving a maximum clock speed of 5.0 GHz, it is the most powerful laptop chip in the Alder Lake lineup. According to Intel, gaming performance is up to 28% better than its Tiger Lake predecessor, the Intel Core i9-11980HK, and up to 40% faster overall.

Intel also makes the provocative claim that the Core i9-12900HK is faster than Apple's M1 Max. The company bases this claim on both Apple's official announcement and internal performance benchmarks conducted using a 16-inch 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Max chip and 64GB of RAM, but it is unclear which model M1 Max (and thus how many cores it has) was tested

This claim is based on both internal performance benchmarks conducted using the 16-inch 2021 MacBook Pro.

If this claim proves to be true, it would mean that Intel, having been sidelined by the performance of Apple's silicon in 2021, has returned to the top dog in the laptop CPU market. When we tested the 2021 MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, we were blown away by their speed and battery efficiency.

Of course, we'll have to wait until we test some Alder Lake Windows laptops to see if Intel delivers on its claims. The first Alder Lake laptops will begin hitting the market next month (February 2022) from companies like Acer, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, and our CES2022 live blog will bring you the most important news from this year's show!