Intel is about to launch its thirteenth Gen Raptor Lake CPUs. These chips are an evolution of its Alder Lake structure, with extra environment friendly cores, larger clocks and different minor upgrades, the form of “tock” refinement of a expertise we have seen in years previous. As the corporate prepares for the launch, it has begun coaching its gross sales workers on new speaking factors for Raptor Lake. This clearly includes numerous PowerPoint, together with convention calls with world gross sales groups. The oldsters at Igor’s Lab have taken over Intel’s gross sales platform, permitting us to see their “go to market” technique for Raptor Lake. General, there’s nothing too shocking right here, but it surely does present us what Intel considers the defining traits of the brand new platform.
The corporate confirms that it’s going to launch with six CPUs: Core i9-13900, i7-13700 and i5-13600. All six CPUs shall be supplied in Okay and KF variants, with Okay unlocked and KF unlocked and with out an built-in GPU. We additionally see the spec differentiation right here, as solely the flagship CPU has Thermal Velocity Enhance at “as much as” 5.8GHz. It will permit a single core to realize these clocks if there’s enough thermal and voltage headroom. Additionally, we see that solely the i9 and i7 fashions provide Turbo Enhance Max 3.0. This enables two cores to spice up to the desired clocks, if there’s sufficient energy and cooling.
That characteristic does not seem on the Core i5 fashions, although they’ll increase to five.1GHz for the efficiency cores. That is a 200 MHz increase over the Alder Lake variant. The Core i9 will get a 500MHz, uh, increase clock increase, and the Core i7 will get a 400MHz max clock increase. The graph under additionally confirms a most TDP of 253 W for the Core i9 and i7 variants. This shall be up towards AMD’s 170W Ryzen 9 7950X and 7900X CPUs, maxing out at 230W. Intel is rumored to supply an “excessive efficiency” mode on some Z790 boards that may raise this restrictor, permitting as much as 350W of juice.
Intel Raptor Lake Launch SKUs; click on to enlarge. (Picture: Intel by way of Igor Lab)
General, Raptor Lake’s important options, in keeping with slides obtained by Igor’s Lab, embrace extra environment friendly cores, sooner reminiscence help, higher motherboard help than AMD, extra cache, and sooner efficiency cores. Beginning on the high, the extra cores factor is easy; is including eight extra effectivity cores to the i9 CPU, for a complete of 16. It will allow Intel’s first 32-threaded CPU within the Core i9-13900K, because the efficiency cores are hyper-threaded. Lastly, it will likely be in a position to compete head-to-head with AMD’s Zen 4.
(Picture: Intel by way of Igor Lab)
As for reminiscence, Raptor Lake will help DDR5 5600 MT/s, in comparison with Alder Lake’s most of 4800 MT/s. It is going to additionally help DDR4 for price range builds, which is a large promoting level in comparison with the DDR5-only Zen 4. It is unclear what AMD’s goal is for reminiscence speeds, however 6000 MT/s has already been mentioned because the candy spot. Both approach, “higher compatibility” than AMD is a official level right here. The identical goes for motherboard compatibility as it would work with older 600 sequence motherboards. That is not the case with Zen 4, which requires the acquisition of a completely new motherboard, together with new reminiscence.
On the cache entrance, Intel is taking a web page from AMD’s playbook. Elevated the L2 and L3 cache for Raptor Lake. For L2, it used 1.25MB per core of throughput on Alder Lake. That has been elevated to 2MB per core, for a complete of as much as 32MB. It additionally doubled the L2 on the effectivity cores from 2MB to 4MB per, and that is shared between 4 core clusters. L3 has been elevated from 30MB of shared reminiscence to 36MB complete.
(Picture: Intel by way of Igor Lab)
The brand new efficiency cores are referred to as Raptor Cove, versus Alder Lake’s Golden Cove cores. They’re made with a refined Intel 7 course of, permitting for larger clocks. The effectivity cores, referred to as Gracemont, have not modified, however there’s extra.
The one different important change Intel is pushing is extra PCIe 4.0 lanes in comparison with Alder Lake, going from 12 to twenty. On the identical time, it is lowering the variety of PCIe 3.0 lanes from 16 to eight. The PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 lanes to the CPU are unchanged at 4 and 16, respectively. The Z790 chipset will provide an extra USB 3.2 lane, making it 5 towards 4 on the Z690.
All in all, a slight enchancment, as anticipated. Nonetheless, it could be simply what Intel wanted to do earlier than transferring to its “unbundled” structure with Meteor Lake. Raptor Lake was all the time a stopgap earlier than Intel took an enormous step ahead with its first tile-based processor. Regardless of its evolutionary design, leaked benchmarks have proven it to make spectacular good points over Alder Lake. It stays to be seen how that may fare towards a completely new AMD structure.
AMD will launch Zen 4 on September 27. Intel is rumored to launch across the identical time because it appears to steal the highlight from AMD.
Now learn:
– Intel Confirms Raptor Lake Launch to Include 6 CPUs
