AMD announced its Ryzen 7000 range of CPUs recently, and it didn’t take long for Intel to clap back. After much speculation, and several teasers, the company has finally announced its new range of 13th gen desktop CPUs, based on the Raptor Lake architecture.
Last year’s Alder Lake chips represented a return to form of Intel in a lot of regards. It switched to a new socket, LGA 1700, and came with a new, big.LITTLE-like CPU layout with bigger, performance-focused, multi-threaded cores and smaller, low-power, single-threaded cores (P-cores and E-cores). Raptor Lake is a smaller leap, but it serves as a continuation of Intel’s path in this direction. It features the same LGA 1700 socket and the same Intel 7 process (which despite the name, is actually a 10nm process), but the chips themselves come with other improvements.
Intel claims up to a 15% improvement in single-core performance and a 41% increase in multi-core performance, but we’ll have to see real-life tests to corroborate that claim. For the first time, all SKUs announced by Intel in this generation are breaking the 5 GHz mark. The Intel Core i5-13600K comes with 14 cores and 20 threads (six P-cores and eight E-cores), with P-cores reaching a top clock speed of 5.1 GHz. The Core i7-13700K brings things up even further with 16 cores and 24 threads (eight P-cores and eight E-cores), and a top clock speed of 5.3 GHz (5.4 GHz with Turbo Boost Max).
Perhaps the more interesting chip, however, is the flagship Core i9-13900K. That one comes with a whopping 24 cores and 32 threads (eight P-cores and 16 E-cores), and a top clock speed of 5.4 GHz. With Turbo Boost Max, it can go up to 5.7 GHz, and with Thermal Velocity Boost, it can go up to a whopping 5.8 GHz. We were promised at least one 6 GHz Raptor Lake CPU by Intel previously, and Intel says that SKU will be available “in limited volumes” next year — it’ll likely be a special-edition Intel Core i9-13900KS.
The CPUs also feature, like their predecessors, PCI Express Gen 5 support, as well as support for up to DDR5-5600 memory. Notably, it keeps around DDR4 support, so if you’re not quite ready to make the jump to DDR5, you can use the older memory standard still. If any of these chips sound like what you want to put at the heart of your next gaming PC, check out the below pricing.
- Intel Core i5-13600KF: $294
- Intel Core i5-13600K: $320
- Intel Core i7-13700KF: $384
- Intel Core i7-13700K: $410
- Intel Core i9-13900KF: $564
- Intel Core i9-13900K: $590
The CPUs will be available on store shelves on October 20th. You can read more about them on Intel’s website.
