With AMD unveiling its 7000 series, Intel is back for the rematch. The semiconductor behemoth unveiled its much-anticipated 13th-generation raptor lake processors. Following the success of Intel’s new P core and E core architectures, giving both performance and efficiency boosts, the 13th generation raptor lake’s announcement went pretty well. It turns out you can still use DDR4 memory modules if you want to save a buck or two, which is really good news for budget builders. This already puts Intel’s raptor lake ahead of the curve when compared to AMD.
Intel Reveals its 13th generation “Raptor Lake” CPUs
Now that Intel knew what the competition was up to, they had the prep time to shift the market on their side, which they did. Some of the gaming performance benchmarks presented by Intel are mind-blowing, to say the least. When compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, the Intel Core i9 13900K outperforms AMD with twice the performance in some titles. If the 13600K is anywhere even close to what the 13900K can do, it’ll be another doomed year for AMD.
But it’s not all as charming as it looks. Right off the bat, the Ryzen 9 5950X and the i9 13900 K were running on mid-tier memory modules. Moreover, the Core i9 13900 K was compared to the predecessor of its competition, i.e., the Ryzen 7000 series. Yes, the 13900 K outperforms the 5950X, but so does the 7600X, which is the actual competition SKU for Intel. But we can’t blame Intel for this awkward timing, can we?
AMD announced their 7000 series CPU lineup before the announcement of Intel’s 13th generation. Therefore, one can argue that Intel did not have any 13th gen equivalents at the time of their testing, right? WRONG!
AMD didn’t have any equivalent when they announced their 7000 series. The 7000 series was compared to its direct predecessor. Now Intel compares its brand-new 13th generation with the same old 5000 series instead of their 12th generation to show their improvement. The 12th generation is already better than the 5000 series, so it doesn’t make any sense for Intel to compare their latest processor with the competition’s predecessor.
Despite this “accidental” timing, Intel did present some stuff that proves that their professionals do more than sit on a couch and eat chips while trying to lie about their performance gain. First off, raptor lake has Intel’s extreme tuning utility, or XTU tool, which has been enhanced more than ever, which is very good news for overclocking enthusiasts. Secondly, they showed off Intel Unison, which makes working on multiple devices easy and seamless, and just to get the public off their backs, they also talked very little about the Intel Arc A770 graphics card.
From what they tell us, the Arc A770 is going to be a little saver for budget PC builders. The card is said to come with a surprising low-price tag of $329, or 26,888 Indian rupees. This still remains unbelievable because the performance this debut Intel GPU provides is equivalent to the RTX 3070, a $499 GPU. The card is said to hit the shelves on October 12th, for real this time.
The 13th generation raptor lake has a tremendous increase in figures across the board. The 13th generation processor, specifically the core i9 13900 K, comes with eight more efficiency or E cores, 8 more threads, and 600 MHz more turbo boost going up to a whopping 5.8 GHz processing speed! Remember when these numbers used to be on the “Overclocking World Record” list? Yes, that was just a year ago!
Moving down the list, we got the Core i7 13700 K with 4 more cores and threads and 400 MHz of more turbo, totalling up to 16 cores and 5.4 GHz. Finally, the Core i5 13600 K, which is extremely popular among budget builders, receives 4 cores and 4 threads upgrade with a 200 MHz turbo boost clock. Intel also claims that the rest of the Raptor Lake i5 lineup will also get efficiency cores. Furthermore, the K series supports overclocking, and with the new XTU (extreme tuning utility), who knows where we will end up?
All of the raptor lake processors come with a 125-watt TDP across all SKUs. Why does a core i5 have the same TDP as the core i9 at Intel? Do we need to buy a 30K motherboard for an 18K processor now? With such a high TDP, you would think that there would be a blazing hole in your motherboard’s CPU socket. But that’s not the case. The upgraded Intel 7 SF process turns out to be more efficient and provides more performance per watt. Of course, we don’t know what that performance is yet.
Talking about the Intel released benchmarks, the graphs show an increase of 24% over the 12900 K, which, to be honest, is blazing fast already. But clearly, what was left unsaid can be seen in the benchmark graphs. Many games see minor or no improvement, with Horizon Zero Dawn performing even worse than the previous generation. But the fact that a 24% uplift is seen in eSports titles and not AAA is rather underwhelming.
This could also have been caused by a GPU bottleneck because the processors are just too fast for the GPU to keep up. Therefore, it will be interesting to see what we get when pairing these beasts with the RTX 4000 or the RX 7000 series.
On paper, the new raptor lake processors sound too good to be true. But Intel’s fishy presentation with slower RAM and comparison with the old competition does raise some trust issues. But that doesn’t make the announcement pointless. Now we just have to wait for the hands-on reviewer’s benchmarks. For all we can say, AMD is no longer the saviour of budget gamers; the crown has been passed over to Intel with the raptor lake processors.
Edited by Prakriti Arora
