Intel hopes to enjoy a sunnier future with the announcement of the company’s 12th Gen Alder Lake chips, led by flagship Core i9-12900K CPU, which the company promises is the “world’s best gaming processor”. With the chips set to become available on November 4, all eyes are on it because of its hybrid layout.

Alder Lake features the company’s latest generation high-performance cores combined with new high-efficiency cores for a new hybrid design, along with updates to Windows 11 to improve performance with the new heterogeneous layout.

This is the first of Intel’s desktop chips to move beyond the 14nm process that is being used since 2015’s 6th Gen Skylake chips; these use the new “Intel 7” manufacturing process.

The new Alder Lake chips use a new approach to x86 chips, resembling the approach that Arm has been taking for years. The idea is no longer to cram as many power-hungry cores as possible into a single chip, instead the company combines “performance” cores with “efficiency” cores.

“Moore’s law is alive and well. Today we are predicting that we will maintain or even go faster than Moore’s law for the next decade,” said Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger. Moore’s Law revolves around the observation that the number of transistors on a processor doubles every two years.

The new chips come at an important time when it is being fiercely contested by AMD and also the outstanding performance of Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, which have made their debut in the new MacBook Pro 2021. At the moment, Intel is releasing a few of its desktop chips and we will have to wait for some time to see how Alder Lake laptop chips stack up against competition.