Intel is preparing to release the first products of the 13th generation Core processor family, codenamed Raptor Lake. Among the highlights the company announced at its Intel Technology Tour is that at least one member of the Raptor Lake family will be able to hit 6GHz out of the box (via Tom’s Hardware ). Core counts and architectural improvements are generally more important than clock speed when it comes to increasing a CPU’s performance these days, but after years of hanging out in the 5GHz range, it’s good to get to the next digit.
As for what this means for performance, Intel says that Raptor Lake will perform about 15 percent better on single-threaded tasks and 41 percent better on multi-threaded workloads than the current 12th-gen Alder Lake chips. Clock speed is most important for boosting single-threaded performance, while adding more cores is usually the best way to improve multi-threaded speeds.
It’s unclear which of the CPUs will be capable of hitting 6GHz or under what conditions or for how long. An Intel SKU chart published by Igor’s Lab suggests that the Core i9-13900K will top out at 5.8GHz, though it’s possible that it can be further boosted beyond that.
Zoom / A purported SKU chart for the 13th-gen chips doesn’t mention the 6GHz limit, but the boost works in mysterious ways.
The SKU chart also confirms what we’ve heard from other leaks – despite the architectural similarity to current Alder Lake processors, Intel is boosting performance by doubling the maximum number of E-cores in its flagship CPUs, from eight to 16. The i5-12600K , which included four E-cores, will also be replaced by a Core i5-13600K that includes eight. And if the rest of the leaked desktop CPU lineup is anything to go by, some lower-end Core i5 processors that shipped without E-cores in the 12th generation will get four or eight in the 13th generation.
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This SKU chart also indicates that these flagship Raptor Lake processors will include other changes, including increased amounts of available L2 and L3 cache. It also appears that the maximum Turbo power consumption of all chips increases between 12W and 63W—from 241W to 253W for the Core i9, from 190W to 253W for the Core i7, and from 150W to 181W for the Core i5. Base power for all chips remains constant at 125W.
These peak power consumption numbers do not necessarily mean that all Raptor Lake processors will consume more power than their Alder Lake counterparts—that will depend on the specific power settings your motherboard or PC manufacturer chooses to use. This means that a Raptor Lake CPU with high power limits and adequate cooling will need more power and better cooling than a similarly configured Alder Lake CPU when running sustained workloads.
Those old enough to remember installing Windows 98 will remember that clock speed bragging rights were a big deal in the early 2000s. Intel planned to boost its Pentium 4 processors from the mid-1 GHz range up to 10 GHz by 2005, but the architecture barely made it to 4 GHz before heat and power consumption both became so high that further increases became untenable (the company’s first attempt at a 4 GHz CPU never saw the limelight).
