Intel may have reclaimed the performance crown with its Alder Lake processors, but it can't afford to sit on its spikey headware, it needs to keep pushing forward. A new benchmark leak suggests that's precisely what it is doing with its top-end next-gen Raptor Lake CPU. An engineering sample (ES) of the Intel Core i9 13900K has been reported managing up to 50% performance improvements over the current Core i9 12900K.
These aren't official performance figures, and the chip isn't expected to drop until autumn, but that hasn't stopped Bilibili user Extreme Player from dropping a video showing off the performance in a number of synthetic tests (via Hardware Info) along with power consumption.
Performance was obtained using an engineering sample of the chip, but at this point, we'd expect that to be pretty much in line with the final released silicon. They've tested using an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard along with 32GB (2x 16GB) of T-Force Delta RGB DDR5-6400 memory.
The Core i9 13900K appears to have a couple of aces up its sleeve in comparison to the Core i9 12900KF used for comparison. The first is that has double the E-core count of its predecessor, with an 8P + 16E configuration as opposed to the existing 8P + 8E setup. That means you're looking at a total of 32 threads versus the 24 of today. The core speed of those performance cores is also significantly increased at 5.5GHz as opposed to 5.1GHz.
In straight single-core testing, this means you're looking at a 10% or so improvement over the current chip, which makes sense given that 400MHz frequency delta. Another way of looking at this is that at the same frequency the new Raptor Lake designs look to be on a par with existing Alder Lake chips in single-threaded benchmarks.
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It's those extra E-cores that make all the difference in some tests though, with Cinebench R23 managing a 39% improvement over the 12900K. The 7-Zip benchmark meanwhile racked up a 152% increase. Nice. Plenty of the other benchmarks also see improvements in the 30-40% range. Unfortunately for us, games are still heavily reliant on single-core performance, though things are slowly improving on this front.
If there is a word of caution at this early stage it's that the power consumption of this chip is significant. During the Intel XTU stress test, the overall package TDP hits 433W. Gulp. And there's thermal throttling even though this is while using a triple-fan AIO CPU cooler.
AMD is expected to launch its Zen 4 architecture this autumn as well, meaning that we could have a real fight on our hands. Given increasing power prices, it looks like power consumption is going to be a big factor this time around though.
