Intel revealed it’s 13th Generation Raptor Lake chips during the Intel Innovation keynote on September 27, 2022. This announcement came a few weeks after AMD announced their new 7000-series CPUs. From what Intel announced the 13th Gen Intel CPUs are expected to trade blows with AMD’s latest offerings.
So what exactly are we getting with the 13th Gen CPUs?
Intel 13th Gen CPUs
Intel revealed six 13th-generation Raptor Lake CPUs: the i5-13600K, i7-13700K, and i9-13900K, plus their KF variants with no dedicated graphics. These CPUs offer more cores and faster clock speeds while delivering more efficiency.
The new CPUs also feature support for new technologies such as DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5.0 while still remaining backward compatible with DDR4 and PCIe Gen 4.0.
Unlocked Intel Core i9 CPUs also feature Adaptive Boost Technology and Thermal Velocity Boost, these allow the processor to ramp up its frequency even further, depending on the power and thermal headroom availability.
The new CPUs also come with a higher CPU cache when compared to the predecessors. This increase is mandatory since the new CPUs have a greater number of cores and can hit higher clock speeds.
Higher Number of Cores
All 13th Generation CPUs are getting a bump in their core numbers. The i5-13600K, which previously had no efficiency cores (E-Cores,) is now getting eight of these, bringing its total cores to 14. The i7-13700K also gets eight efficiency cores, up from Alder Lake’s four E-Cores. Lastly, the i7-13900K doubles the previous gen’s eight E-Cores to a whopping 16, giving Intel’s top enthusiast chip a total of 24 cores.
The performance cores for all Raptor Lake CPUs remain the same as those of the 12th-Gen CPUs, but the increase in Efficiency Cores allows the 13th-Gen CPUs to perform better in multitasking.
For example, suppose you’re rendering a video on Adobe Premiere and launch work on another app like Chrome. When Premiere Pro is in the background, its workload is transferred to the E-Cores. You can continue working on Chrome using the performance cores (P-Core) with minimal effect on performance.
Higher Clock Speeds
Aside from the additional efficiency cores, the 13th Generation processors all receive a bump in clock speed. The 12th Gen 12900K tops out at 5.2GHz. However, the mainstream i5-13600K now has a max clock speed of 5.1GHz.
If you go up the model numbers, the i7-13700K can hit 5.4GHz, while the i9-13900K has a blazingly fast 5.8GHz maximum clock speed. I doubt you’ll ever hit such clock speeds though 🙂
Intel also announced that they’ll release a Raptor Lake CPU that’ll hit 6.0GHz out of the box in early 2023. This is a massive performance boost, and we are excited to see how these CPUs perform in real-world tests.
Increased Efficiency
With more power comes massive power draw, and this is the case for the 13th gen Intel CPUs. Despite having the same base TDP of 125W as last year’s 12th gen CPUs, they require significantly more when on Turbo.
The i5-12600K, i7-12700K, and i9-12900K had a max TDP of 150W, 190W, and 241W respectively. On the other hand, their 13th-Gen counterparts now require 181W for the i5-13600K and 253W for both the i7-13700K and i9-13900K. These are massive increases, especially for the i7-13700K. However, these CPUs also come with a massive bump in processing power.
Despite that, Intel claims its Raptor Lake chips are more efficient than the Alder Lake CPUs from last year. According to Intel, its validation platforms showed that a 13900K running at 65W performs on par with a 12900K at 241W. And when you push the i9-13900K at max TDP, the chip performs 41% better than its predecessor.
RAM Selection
While Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs are DDR5 compatible, they still support DDR4 RAM, allowing PC builders to upgrade their 12th-gen processors without requiring a RAM upgrade. This is unlike AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors, which only work with DDR5 memory.
Although DDR4 RAM might bottleneck the CPU’s performance, it allows users to upgrade their systems gradually. After all, DDR5 RAM is still expensive. So, even if you don’t have the budget to upgrade your RAM, you can enjoy the increased performance delivered by the Raptor Lake processors.
What do you think about the new 13th gen Intel CPUs? Will you be upgrading? Let us know in the comment section below.
Hopefully they’ll be power efficient