Intel's 13th-Gen 'Raptor Lake' CPUs Are Official, Launch October 20

Codenamed Raptor Lake, Intel says it has made some improvements to the CPU architecture and the Intel 7 manufacturing process, but the strategy for improving their performance is both time-tested and easy to understand: add more cores, and make them run at higher clock speeds. From a report: Intel is announcing three new CPUs today, each with and without integrated graphics (per usual, the models with no GPUs have an 'F' at the end): the Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, and Core i5-13600K will launch on October 20 alongside new Z790 chipsets and motherboards. They will also work in all current-generation 600-series motherboards as long as your motherboard maker has provided a BIOS update, and will continue to support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory.

Raptor Lake uses the hybrid architecture that Intel introduced in its 12th-generation Alder Lake chips last year -- a combination of large performance cores (P-cores) that keep games and other performance-sensitive applications running quickly, plus clusters of smaller efficiency cores (E-cores) that use less power -- though in our testing across laptops and desktops, it's clear that 'efficiency' is more about the number of cores can be fit into a given area on a CPU die, and less about lower overall system power consumption. There have been a handful of other additions as well. The amount of L2 cache per core has been nearly doubled, going from 1.25MB to 2MB per P-core and from 2MB to 4MB per E-core cluster (E-cores always come in clusters of four). The CPUs will officially support DDR5-5600 RAM, up from a current maximum of DDR5-4800, though that DDR5-4800 maximum can easily be surpassed with XMP memory kits in 12th-generation motherboards. The maximum officially supported DDR4 RAM speed remains DDR4-3200, though the caveat about XMP applies there as well. As far as core counts and frequencies go, the Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs each pick up one extra E-core cluster, going from four E-cores to eight. The Core i9 gets two new E-core clusters, boosting the core count from eight all the way up to 16. All E-cores have maximum boost clocks that are 400MHz higher than they were before.

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