Intel releases 13th generation Core processor Raptor Lake: clocked up to 5.8GHz
Last year’s 12th-generation Core pioneered the x86 high-performance hybrid architecture, and at the Intel On Technology Innovation Summit just now, Intel launched its successor, the 13th-generation Core processor Raptor Lake. It greatly improves the response speed of the P-Core on the basis of Alder Lake and increases the number of E-Cores to greatly improve the multi-threaded performance of the processor.
Image: Intel
As always, the 13th generation Core processors will cover desktops and notebooks, including 35W, 65W, and 125W products for desktops and U, P, H, and HX series products for mobile. However, the starting lineup is the same as the 12th-generation Core that year, with only six K and KF processors.
The number of P-Cores of the 13th-generation Core processor has not changed. It is the same as the previous generation, with a maximum of 8, but the maximum frequency has been increased to 5.8GHz. Compared with the Core i9-12900K, it has increased by 600MHz, and compared with the Core i9-12900KS, it is also 300MHz higher, and the number of E-Cores has doubled from 8 to 16, and can have up to 32 threads of 8P+16E. In addition, the L2 cache of the P-Core was increased from 1.25MB to 2MB, and the L2 cache of the E-Core was increased from 2MB to 4MB. Numerous improvements can bring up to 15% single-threaded and 41% multi-threaded performance improvements on the 13th-generation Core processors.
The 13th generation Core processor has better support for DDR5 memory and now supports DDR5-5600 memory. The matching 700 series motherboard supports more PCI-E 4.0 channels, and now the Z790 PCH can provide up to 20 PCI-E 4.0, an increase of 8 compared to the previous generation, and the number of USB 3.2 Gen 2*2 interfaces available has also increased from 4 increased to 5. Users can also directly use the 13th generation Core processor directly on the existing 600 series motherboard.
The Raptor Lake processor adopts an improved version of the Intel 7 process technology, and the channel mobility has been significantly improved. Compared with the manufacturing process used by Alder Lake, there is still a significant process improvement in the optimized new manufacturing process.
P-Core adopts the Raptor Cove architecture, which can obtain the same frequency as Golden Cove at a lower voltage. Under the same voltage, the frequency can be increased by 200MHz, and the highest frequency can be further increased by 500MHz, up to 5.8GHz. This optimized voltage and frequency curve will allow Raptor Lake to perform better on low-voltage notebook processors. Raptor Cove’s L2 cache capacity has been increased to 2MB, and a new dynamic prefetching method has been adopted, using machine learning for real-time data telemetry to achieve more accurate prefetching.
Image: Intel
E-Core still maintains the Grace Mont architecture unchanged, but the number of cores has doubled, up to 16 cores, the L2 cache capacity shared by each group has also doubled to 4MB, and the frequency has also been increased to a maximum of 4.3GHz. Now E-Core has surpassed the first-generation Skylake processor in terms of IPC and frequency, with better performance and lower power consumption, with a very good energy consumption ratio. E-Core also improved the prefetch algorithm, achieving a 7% performance improvement.
The L3 cache capacity has been increased to 36MB, and the new smart cache has two modes of dynamic inclusion and non-inclusion. The inclusive mode puts all MOC data in the smart cache, so it is more optimized for single-threaded performance improvement; The non-inclusive mode selectively puts the MOC data into the cache, which has the effect of optimizing the multi-threaded performance. Raptor Lake can set the intelligent cache mode through dynamic policies, and set the applicable inclusive or non-inclusive mode according to various application scenarios.
The frequency of the ring bus has also been further improved. Compared with the previous generation, the maximum increase is 900MHz. Now the ring bus frequency can reach up to 5GHz. This helps to further improve these improvements, which reduce the latency of the entire data read, which greatly benefits application scenarios such as games.
Raptor Lake’s 15% single-thread performance improvement is mostly brought about by the frequency increase, and the cache and memory improvements have a small impact. The 41% increase in multi-threading performance is mainly due to the increase in the number of cores, the increase in frequency, and the increase in cache capacity, and the memory improvement also has a small effect.
If the power consumption of the Core i9-13900K is adjusted to the same 241W as the Core i9-12900K, the performance is still ahead by 37%, and if it is adjusted to 115W, the performance is still 21% higher than the latter. Even the Core i9-13900K only needs 65W of power to achieve the same multi-threaded performance as the Core i9-12900K. The performance per watt improvement of Raptor Lake is very significant compared to the previous generation.
Intel compared and tested 32 games with the Core i9-13900K and the Core i9-12900K, and more than half of the games had a performance improvement of more than 5%. Compared with the opponent’s Ryzen 9 5950X, the 12th and 13th generation Cores have a good performance, and many games have double-digit percentage leads, but compared with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the gap is not that big.
In terms of content creation, in the Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effect software tests, the Core i9-13900K is far ahead of the Ryzen 9 5950X in various content creation applications, and it also has a lot of performance improvements over the Core i9-12900K.
