13th Gen Intel "Raptor Lake" processors are official, launching October 20

Enlarge / An overview of the enhancements to Intel's 13th Gen desktop chips. Intel

If there's one thing Intel has gotten good at over the past few years, it's refining a CPU architecture. Between 2015 and 2020, manufacturing issues caused Intel to release not one, not two, but five generations of processors based on iterations of the sixth-generation Skylake core, while still managing to increase enough clock speeds and core count to stay competitive for most of that time.

It's an approach Intel is returning to for its 13th Gen Core processors, the first of which are officially announced today. Codenamed Raptor Lake, Intel claims to have made some improvements to the processor architecture and manufacturing process of Intel 7, but the strategy for improving their performance is both proven and easy to understand: add more cores and run them at a higher clock. speeds.

Intel today announced three new processors, each with and without integrated graphics (as usual, non-GPU models have an "F" at the end): Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K and the Core i5 -13600K will launch on October 20 alongside the new Z790 chipsets and motherboards. They will also work on all current generation 600 series motherboards as long as your motherboard manufacturer has provided a BIOS update and will continue to support DDR4 and DDR5 memory.

Raptor Lake uses the hybrid architecture that Intel introduced last year in its 12th generation Alder Lake chips: a combination of large performance cores (P-cores) that enable games and other performance-sensitive applications to run fast, as well as smaller chip clusters of efficiency cores (E-cores) that draw less power - although in our laptop and desktop tests, it's clear that "the 'efficiency' is more about the number of cores that can fit into a given area on a processor die, and less about how low overall system power consumption is.

There were also a handful of other additions. The amount of L2 cache per core has nearly doubled, from 1.25MB to 2MB per P-core and from 2MB to 4MB per E-core cluster (E-cores still come in clusters of four). The processors will officially support DDR5-5600 RAM, up from a current maximum of DDR5-4800, although this DDR5-4800 maximum can easily be exceeded with XMP memory kits in 12th generation motherboards.

Maximum officially supported DDR4 RAM speed remains DDR4-3200, although the caveat regarding XMP also applies.

Enlarge / Additional cache, faster memory speeds, and increased clock speed are responsible for the single-threaded performance gains for the i9-13900K. Additional electronic cores make multi-core upgrades much more significant. Intel

In terms of core count and frequencies, the Core i5 and Core i7 processors each take an additional E-core cluster, dropping from four E-cores to eight. The Core i9 gets two new E-core clusters, increasing the number of cores from eight to 16. All E-cores have maximum boost clocks that are 400MHz higher than before. The number of P cores remains the same across the range, but the maximum boost clock has been increased by 600 MHz, 400 MHz and 200 MHz for Core i9, i7 and i5, respectively. As K-series chips, they are all unlocked for overclocking when used with Z690 or Z790 motherboard...