Intel’s Raptor Lake flagship will get a new faster version – as happened with Alder Lake – and it’ll arrive in the near-ish future, with a debut planned for early in 2023.
Intel revealed the launch timeframe for what will likely be the Core i9-13900KS – although the name isn’t confirmed, and wasn’t mentioned – which just like the 12900KS will be a special edition with a limited volume made, and the processor will naturally be pricey as a result.
As Team Blue had previously indicated, the KS spin on the Raptor Lake flagship will reach the dizzying heights of 6GHz boost.
The key point here is that it does this right out of the box, by default, so those who want to tinker and push with overclocking are going to be able to ramp up things even more than that. And the kind of folks interested in the 13900KS are going to be those sorts of enthusiasts, of course.
Analysis: What kind of boost – and what kind of price?
Intel doesn’t say when that 6GHz boost comes into play, but presumably it’ll be the max speed, pedal to the metal, achieved with TVB (Thermal Velocity Boost), meaning that this clock frequency will only be feasible for brief periods of time.
Could it refer to the all-core boost for the limited-edition Raptor Lake flagship? No, surely not, because in that case, the CPU would go even faster than this on a single-core (with TVB), and that speed would be the headline frequency Intel would be boasting about.
The other question is how much the 13900KS will cost, and there’s no clue as to that yet. However, Intel has priced the 13900K at the same recommended price as the 12900K, so it’d follow that the company would maintain pricing at the level of the 12900KS – which is to say a fair old bump at $739 versus $589 (in the US) for the vanilla flagship. That said, with rumors Intel is going to push up pricing where it can with some chips, there’s always the possibility that with a limited-edition release, the price tag could be hiked up a bit more. We would hope it wouldn’t come near to $800 in the US, though…
We’ll just have to see when the revamped CPU launches, and we’re thinking that could be very early 2023 – like January or February – but exactly when may depend on when AMD pushes out its 3D V-cache versions of Ryzen 7000 processors. The latter will up the ante considerably for Team Red, and Intel will want to steal some of the thunder of that launch, at least at the top-end.
Via VideoCardz (opens in new tab)
