Intel’s Raptor Lake processors have been the subject of another leak, and this time the benchmark spill is heavy, centered around the Core i9-13900K flagship chip.
Of course, let’s put in the usual caveats up front: these are just supposed results and might not be genuine – we have to trust that – and this is a pre-release (engineered) sample of the 13900K (which, as you may remember, is a 24-core CPU with eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores).
The benchmark scores come from Bilibili (opens in new tab) (discovered by VideoCardz (opens in new tab)), a video sharing site in China, so keep in mind that it’s not what we consider the most reliable source, so be even more cautious than usual here. That said, the results look detailed and are a big work of fake if they are in fact completely fabricated.
Benchmarks are pulled from a variety of suites, including the usual suspects like Blender, CineBench, Geekbench, and CPU-Z, with the 13900K being paired with an RTX 3060 Ti GPU and DDR5 system RAM on an Asus ROG Z690 motherboard. Extreme.
So what do the scores show us? That is, compared to the current 12900K, the Raptor Lake flagship is about 10% faster on average for single-core performance and about 35% faster for multi-core.
As you might expect, some benchmarks show a more pronounced lead for the 13900K, and this goes up to 46% faster for multi-core performance as compared to CPU-Z (with the Raptor Lake CPU being 40% faster on CineBench R23 multi-core and 41% faster in some Blender tests).
Analysis: More evidence that Raptor Lake will be a worthy upgrade
Another key point here is the clock speed shown for the 13900K sample chip, which is a base frequency of 3GHz, ramping up to 5.5GHz, but up to 5.7GHz when reaching its fastest speed. This exactly matches another leak we saw a few days ago, again for an alleged Raptor Lake main CPU engineering sample, which adds some weight to this rumor here.
And indeed, it’s more fuel for the fire of the general theory that the 13900K should hit 5.7GHz when the proverbial throttle is on the ground – with Thermal Velocity Boost meaning a short-term burst of speed – and that maybe we can see 5.8 GHz as rumored earlier. Remember, this is still a silicon sample, so the final version of the 13900K will likely offer a little more oomph – and the same goes for these benchmark results. Again, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen some heavy hints that the Raptor Lake flagship will be an impressive step up from the existing 12900K.
The single-core gains are more modest, but still perfectly healthy – for a sample chip – although they seem to have more to do with the faster boost levels that the 13900K is being pushed towards here (the 12900K hits its max. 5.2 GHz). Gaming benchmarks will be where a lot of interest is focused, of course, on how far Raptor Lake advances, with beefed up levels of onboard cache expected to help you against Alder Lake in that regard.
For what’s billed as a simple Alder Lake upgrade, Intel’s 13th-gen processors look attractive enough from where we are now. If there’s a concern here for Team Blue fans who are already thinking about a high-end CPU, it’s that this leak shows the 13900K hitting a ‘PL4’ power usage (the maximum allowed as a temporary spike) as high as 420W. , which is seriously power -hungry – but we must remember that this is still a pre-release CPU.
What’s also worth noting is that the Raptor Lake will be up against Ryzen 7000 chips built on an all-new Zen 4 architecture, silicon that looks to be very promising in terms of the impact it could make, reaching eye-opening boost speeds for newbies. . It is thought that both competing next-gen CPU ranges will release around the same time, i.e. September or October 2022.
