Core i9-13900 tested
A few weeks ago, we told you about the sighting of a Core i9-13900K processor, part of the upcoming Raptor Lake series, which will replace the current Alder Lake. The chip in question was an engineering sample with 24 cores and 32 threads, featuring an 8 P-core and 16 E-core configuration. On that occasion, the CPU had already proved to be faster than a Core i9-12900K despite the lower frequencies. In particular, the performances were higher than 6% and 24%, respectively, in the single core and multi core tests of UserBenchmark.Today, instead we are talking about an Engineering Sample of Core i9-13900, also it features 8 "Raptor Cove" P-cores and 16 "Gracemont" E-cores, with 16MB L2 cache for P-cores (2MB per core) and 16MB L2 cache for E-Cores (4MB per cluster of 4 cores). In total, combined with the L3 cache, it means that the processor can count on 68MB of cache which, according to some rumors, Intel should call "Game Cache". Expreview has published an interesting article comparing the Core i9-13900 prototype with the current Core i9-12900K. The system used was the same, based on the Z690 platform with a couple of G-Skill DDR5-5200 modules and a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card.
As you can see from the graphs below, despite the fact that it is a an ES, resulting in lower operating frequencies than the final model, the Core i9-13900K managed to outdo the Core i9-12900K, which bodes well for the final performance of the product. Precisely for this reason, Expreview, in order to make a fairer comparison, blocked the clock of the Core i9-12900K at 3.8Ghz, but, obviously, the management of the frequencies of the Raptor Lake processor is still immature, so it was not possible fully exploit the potential of the chip.
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Intel Core i9-13900 engineering sample is 20% faster than Alder Lake in new benchmarks
Highly anticipated: The frequency of leaks surrounding Intel's upcoming 13th-gen processors keeps increasing as we get closer to their launch. New benchmarks of an i9-13900 engineering sample show that the CPU will feature an impressive boost to multi-threaded performance, thanks to the addition of eight extra E-cores.
Intel's 13th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs are still a few months away from launch, but that hasn't stopped a Chinese tech site from obtaining and testing an early sample of the i9-13900.
It features 8 Performance cores and a whopping 16 Efficient cores, twice that of its predecessor, the i9-12900. Other notable differences are a new microarchitecture for the P-cores, codenamed Raptor Cove, and an increased amount of L2 and L3 cache.
ExpReview used a current-gen Z690 motherboard for testing and found that the unreleased processor is surprisingly already supported. However, due to it being an engineering sample, the big cores only boost up to 3.8 GHz.
In application benchmarks, the i9-13900 is 20 percent faster on average compared to an i9-12900K locked at the same frequency, thanks to those extra E-cores. The Raptor Lake chip is a bit slower than its predecessor in single-threaded workloads and gaming, though we can probably chalk that up to the unfinalized microcode and lack of proper BIOS support.
Earlier this week, Intel also updated its Extreme Tuning Utility, adding support for something it calls 'Efficient Thermal Velocity Boost' and some new overclocking functionalities. A hardware leaker has suggested a high-end Raptor Lake SKU (a successor to the i9-12900KS?) might use these features to boost up to 6 GHz on one or two cores.
In related news, a list of Asrock's upcoming Z790 and H770 motherboards leaked recently, confirming that Intel's Raptor Lake platform will still support DDR4 memory.