Core i9-11980HK review: Intel's flagship CPU slugs it out with Ryzen laptops 11th-gen vs. 10th-gen vs. Ryzen 5000 vs. Ryzen 4000: Fight! Credit: Intel Today, we’ll give you a taste of where Intel’s Core i9-11980HK lands, but we cannot do so without giving you the lecture. People tend to fixate on a CPU as a monolithic component but they’re not, especially in chips that are built for opportunistic boost clocks based on how much cooling and power they’re given. That’s virtually all of them these days. Put an Intel or AMD CPU into a bigger laptop with more cooling and power and you tend to get better performance. Drop the exact same CPU into a tiny, thin notebook with less power and cooling and you tend to get lower performance. So always remember to factor in the laptop around your CPU of choice when making any evaluation.