A newly leaked benchmark may have revealed that the Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900K could be 20% faster than the Alder Lake Core i9-12900K in multi-threading.
This reference leak, which comes from expressview and reported by Wccftechwas revealed shortly after the i9-13900K was reportedly seen in the wild with 24 cores (8+16) and 32 wires. Clock speeds are 3.8 GHz (P-cores) max boost, while the E-Cores have been split with two clusters running at 2.8 GHz and the other two clusters running at 1.0 GHz.
This means that the reported speeds are inconsistent as this is an engineering sample (ES), and the final speed is estimated to be as high as 6 GHz. It is also claimed to have 32MB of L2 cache, which combined with the L3 cache gives us 68MB in total, supposedly labeled “Game Cache”. With these combined increases in cache and clock speed, Raptor Lake should perform well in games.
The i9-13900K and i9-12900K were tested using a Z690 platform with a pair of G.Skill DDR5-5200 memory and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. And in clock speed tests, Raptor Lake seems to win by hand. the Alder Lake by that 20% margin.
According to this same leak, Raptor Lake performs worse than Alder Lake in single-core tests as the latter has an optimized BIOS and a higher TDP threshold. And as said before, the former is an ES, so its current clock speeds are unstable. In gaming benchmarks, the Raptor Lake appears to be on par with the Alder Lake, but as noted earlier, if these leaked specs are true, then at launch the Raptor Lake should be performing even better.
Analysis: Can AMD hope to compete?
Despite the limited information we have of Team Green’s upcoming Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900K CPU, it looks like Team Red is gearing up for it with its own release in september of the AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU, a month ahead of the possible October release of Raptor Lake.
And while AMD still has an edge due to its more efficient CPUs, versus Intel’s much more demanding ones, the latter seems to be looking forward to a big increase in clock speeds if the rumors of up to 6 GHz are true.
The new architecture of Lake Raptor is rumors of lowering energy consumption by 20% to 25% using a DLVR (digital linear voltage regulator), which would take the wind out of AMD’s sails. We’ll have to wait and see how much the Ryzen 7000 can compete with its new architecture (Zen 4, built on TSMC 5nm) and with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support at launch.