Highly anticipated: Intel has been teasing its upcoming 13th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs with a couple of enticing announcements. It claims the processors will be the first to operate at 6 GHz at stock, and that they have already set a “world overclocking record” of 8 GHz.
Team blue gave us a peek at Raptor Lake during the Intel Tech Tour 2022 in Israel. One slide showed that Intel is looking to beat rival AMD in terms of clock speeds with Raptor Lake. We know that the Ryzen 9 7950X is clocked up to 5.7 GHz, but Intel says its next chips can beat that by 300 MHz with a 6 GHz model.
Intel never said which Raptor Lake SKU would have the 6 GHz stock speed or when it would arrive. While it could be the flagship Core i9-13900K, which recent leaks suggest will perform similarly to the Ryzen 9 7950X, that particular 24-core (8P + 16E) CPU is said to hit 5.8 GHz, suggesting the 6 GHz frequency might be reserved for a KS model like the Core i9-12900KS.
The slide also claims that Raptor Lake has already been overclocked up to 8 GHz using liquid nitrogen. Intel says this is an OC world record, though that probably comes with some caveats as 8.7 GHz is the overall world record.
Intel also said that Raptor Lake offers a 15% uplift for single-threaded workloads and 41% for multi-threaded work.
Like Alder Lake, Raptor Lake combines Performance (P) and Efficiency (E) cores. While the E cores are based on the same Gracemont cores as Alder Lake, the P cores are now Raptor Cove as opposed to the last generation’s Golden Cove.
In addition to the higher frequencies, Raptor Lake is expected to offer twice the amount of E-cores and more L2 and L3 cache compared to Alder Lake, while the more advanced memory controllers will bring official support for DDR5-5600 (as opposed to Alder Lake’s DDR5-4800) and DDR4-3200 memory.
Intel will be hoping the Raptor Lake CPUs can help it regain some of the consumer confidence it is losing through the Arc Alchemist GPU launch—the company recently had to deny it was shutting the division down, the second time it’s had to issue such a statement. But with so much hype surrounding Zen 4, Chipzilla is going to have a fight on its hands in the next-gen-processor market.
Intel is set to announce the Raptor Lake CPUs at the Innovation event on September 27. The processors are expected to launch in October.
Intel slide credit: Andreas Schilling/HardwareLuxx