Core i9-13900KS announced by Intel
On the first day of Intel Innovation, held in presence in San Jose and broadcast live on the company's official YouTube channel, the new 13th generation Raptor Lake Core processors were finally presented. As anticipated in the various rumors and leaked tests, the CPUs significantly improve performance from the past generation, scoring a + 15% and + 45% respectively in single thread and multi thread. In addition to the core count, the frequencies also increase: the top of the range Core i9-13900K will reach 5.8GHz in boost. Core i9-13900KS on the other hand, will hit new heights by offering a maximum frequency of 6GHz.
The fastest model, as announced by the slides shown at the event, will be available early next year and in limited volumes. The KS variants, introduced with the 9th generation Coffee Lake CPUs, are Intel-certified models to offer maximum performance and energy efficiency, operating stably with higher clocks. The previous version, ie Core i9-12900KS, was for example capable of reaching 5.2GHz on all P-cores.
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Yesterday's stage did not however only concern the Raptor Lake, Intel has in fact finally announced the availability date for the first Arc Alchemist GPU model, namely Arc A770. The video card aims to compete with RTX 3060, Radeon RX 6650 XT and other mid-range models, delivering up to 65% better ray tracing performance than the competition.
Intel Announces 13th Gen Processors: Core i9 13900K Faster, More Cores Than Ryzen 9 7950X
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC)has revealed its highly anticipated 13th Generation 'Raptor Lake' Processors, which will have up to 24 cores and hit frequencies as high as 6GHz.
Intel's new 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs
IntelAt the top of the stack is the Core i9-13900K with eight Performance Cores and 16 Efficient Cores, giving 24 cores in total and able to reach up to 5.8GHz. The 6GHz figure will come from a future Core i9-13900KS model, with that number being revealed in other slides during recent presentation slides.
MORE FROM FORBESIntel Core i9-13900KS Is Likely Its Monster 6GHz Surprise processorBy Antony LeatherThe new flagship has eight more cores in total than the Core i9-12900K and beats AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X by the same amount, with both those CPUs only having 16 cores. This should give it a substantial boost to multi-threaded workloads, while other improvements under the hood as well as higher frequencies should mean it's faster in lightly-threaded workloads and games too.
Pricing looks very competitive, with the Core i9-13900K set to sell for $589 (RCP, USD) - over $100 less than AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X, which will cost $699 at launch. Meanwhile, the Core i7-13700K will see a boost up to 16 cores, gaining four more efficient cores over the Core i7-12700K and has a price of $409, which is similar to the Ryzen 7 7700X which has eight cores.
Intel's new K-series Raptor Lake CPUs
IntelThe star of the show, at least on paper, seems to be the Core i5 13600K, which has 14 cores - four more than the Core i5-12600K, seeing a doubling of Efficient Cores from four to eight, but the same number - 6 - of Performance Cores. It will have a price of $319, making it a potential mid-range winner.
Raptor Lake will see higher frequencies and increased core counts
IntelAccording to Intel, Raptor Lake, which uses its Intel 7 manufacturing process, is built for speed. There's a full manufacturing node's performance increase moving from 12th Gen to 13th Gen CPUs with improvements in efficiency, IPC and frequency.
There's a 900MHz faster fabric and more L2 cache for starters compared to 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs, now sitting at 2MB per core plus faster 'Raptor Cove' cores add up to 600MHz to the peak boost frequencies.
Intel's 13th Gen CPUs will see increased core counts, particularly with 'efficient' E-Cores
IntelThe Efficient Cores, which are the second type of core used in 12th Gen CPUs have changed too. There are, as we've already mentioned, up to 16 of them with 4MB L2 cache per cluster on each CPU, which also benefit from much higher frequencies this time around. According to Intel, there's up to 16 percent performance improvement in some software just from these cache improvements.
It's Thread Director feature - the brains behind dealing with all those threads to optimize performance - has been improved too. Intel has used machine learning techniques to improve the way it works, it's updated the thread class boundaries to make thread prioritization faster and more efficient and Windows 11's 22H2 update is one of many that have honed the handling of background services with improvements elsewhere too.
Intel's Thread Director is now more efficient and can better-utilize Intel's Performance and ... [+] Efficient Cores.
IntelSpeaking to Mandy Mock recently, Intel's Vice President and general manager for Desktop, Workstation and Channel Group, she had this to say on Raptor Lake and what the company was trying to achieve with it:
'We were really thinking how to be efficient and use the space we had to best effect, so you get four E-cores in the same space as you get one P-core and being able to balance between the two give you a lot of flexibility.
When we looked more into it, we found that if you do intelligent things with Thread Director - making use of those different core types, but also not just putting heavy loads onto the P-core and light loads onto E-cores - but intelligently thinking about what people actually do so they get that responsiveness, this has been really ground-breaking for us compared how we did things before.
Intel's 13th Gen Raptor Lake processor
IntelWe really were looking at what we could do to bring as much as potential as possible for users, so the increase in core counts, cache sizes and the way we're looking at real world usages and to balance that across the architecture.
There's honestly not many ways that we use the hybrid architecture differently, but what is different is we're now getting much more prevalent in the ecosystem in terms of software and those developers are able to dictate where they want those threads to run, so as that starts to branch out and you see people in the ecosystem using it, the more benefit there is.
I'm mainly talking about Thread Director here, because they can adjust the quality of service (QOS) mechanism and when they do that well it helps us optimize the whole environment.'
I'll be back with a full interview with Mandy Mock as well as reviews of all this autumn's launches from Intel, AMD and Nvidia so check me out on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook or follow me here on Forbes using the button next to my name above.