Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs are expected to arrive in late 2022, and we’ve just glimpsed the potential power of the 13th-gen processor – which might scare AMD engineers away, at least with the apparent gains in some respects.
The Core i9-13900 appeared in several results in the SiSoftware Sandra database such as VideoCardz (opens in new tab) reports, with SiSoftware (opens in new tab) rounding off these benchmarks as a ‘performance preview’ in an article that also summarizes the supposed specs for the main CPU (view all this with a skeptical eye, naturally).
As per previous rumors, the Core i9-13900 will run on eight performance cores with 16 efficiency cores, meaning it is a 24-core CPU (although it only has 32 threads as the efficiency cores do not feature hyper-threading). . In other words, performance cores will remain the same in number as Alder Lake, but Intel is doubling efficiency cores – a huge leap indeed.
Supposedly, we’re looking at a 20% larger L3 cache with Raptor Lake compared to Alder Lake too, and the L2 cache is twice the size of the performance and efficiency cores (2MB per core for the first and 4MB per cluster of four cores for the latter).
Apparently, we’ll also see support for faster DDR5 system RAM (5600MT/s, which is a 16% increase compared to Intel’s current 12th Gen chips), if the details provided by SiSoftware are correct, of course (again , let’s remain skeptical).
So what about the performance findings based on various SiSoftware Sandra benchmarks of a sample Core i9-13900 chip?
In ALU/FPU (arithmetic) tests, the flagship Raptor Lake achieved a huge improvement of between 33% to 50% over the current Core i9-12900 benchmark results provided for comparison. Also, this was at pre-release clocks for the Raptor Lake sample, i.e. 3.7 GHz for the performance cores and 2.76 GHz for the efficiency ones (compared to 5 GHz and 3.8 GHz for the flagship Alder Lake).
With vectored/SIMD tests, the Core i9-13900 achieved gains of around 5% to 8% over the flagship Alder Lake.
Analysis: How much bite can this Raptor have, then?
While any benchmarking of early silicon samples needs to be considered with caution, what we see here – for heavy performance benchmarks – gives us some broad ideas of what Intel might be looking to achieve with Raptor Lake.
This massive jump to ALU/FPU testing is certainly very impressive, and while the gains elsewhere aren’t quite as surprising, SiSoftware notes that they are still ‘encouraging’, and we have to keep in mind the nerfed clocks from the sampler. engineering being tested here.
With Intel keeping the performance cores at the same number (8) but doubling the efficiency cores to a whopping 16, we can certainly expect some attractive multi-core performance boosts even if the acceleration with single-core performance is more modest. .
Given that there is no motion with performance cores compared to Alder Lake, and 16 instead of eight efficiency cores, we can also assume that Intel intends to improve power efficiency with Raptor Lake. Although no doubt with so many efficiency cores being introduced, clock speeds will need to be controlled a bit compared to Alder Lake as it undoubtedly has something to do with power requirements of course.
With better efficiency, Raptor Lake might be great news for laptops, but that matters less for desktop PCs, and this is where an element of doubt remains as to exactly how Raptor Lake might work when we hear some tantalizing things about Zen 4, and how far AMD might be moving forward with clock speeds. Indeed, Team Red looks set to take big leaps with its high-end chips capable of mustering boosts across all cores up to 5.5GHz (admittedly situationally – we discuss this in more depth here).
Still, Alder Lake is winning the battle in terms of gaming against AMD’s now rapidly aging Zen 3 processors, and Raptor Lake is rumored to increase to impressive levels as well – plus we shouldn’t forget that beefed-up cache, which will also help gamers running Intel’s 13th generation silicon.
It’s clearly too early to start making any weighty predictions around who might win the battle of high-end CPUs, but it’s becoming a piece of junk. And as always, when that’s the case, the winner is expected to end up being the consumer, as both Intel and AMD push each other to do better – or to be more relatively affordable, perhaps to balance things out up front. of prices.