Intel Core i9-13900 Raptor Lake Up To 50 Faster Than Core i9-12900 Alder Lake

In the rivalry of Intel and AMD, they have tried their best to overcome the other. Similarly, as the era continues, to get to grips with the AMD’s Zen 4 Raphael lineup, Intel’s latest beast Raptor Lake Desktop CPUs will launch later this year. Packing in 24 cores and 32 threads in an early engineering state, which is pretty impressive, SiSoftware has once again published a mini-review of a Core i9-13900 CPU, and all of this publishing was to compete with Intel’s Alder Lake & AMD Zen 3 chips.

Even At a Low Clock Speed of 3.7 GHz, Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 ES CPU is Up To 50% Faster Than Alder Lake Core i9-12900

In an optimized 10nm (Intel 7+) package, The 13th Gen Intel Raptor Lake CPUs will feature in itself the latest raptor Cove P-Cores combined with the Gracemont (E-Cores). In contrast with the Alder Lake, besides just clock speeds and cores improvements, the Raptor Lake will be forged with a lot more differential improvements. And those will be as follows:

• Support for up to DDR5-5600 memory (JEDEC)
• 20% Larger L3 cache (Up To 36 MB Unified)
• 2x Larger L2 cache (Up To 32 MB)
• Support For AVX/AVX2 on E-Cores
• No Support For AVX-512 (Just Like Alder Lake-S)

The Raptor Lake CPU specimen that was tested is an Intel Core i9-13900. It packs in a total of 24 cores and 32 threads and features 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores. A max clock speed of 3.7 GHz was clicked for the P-Cores, and 2.76 GHz for the E-Cores. As the rumors are always there, according to the words, the retail version, which will be hitting over 5.5 GHz speeds and the tested clock speeds of the Raptor Lake, is shallow. Talking about the CPU, for a wholesome total of 68 MB of Gaming cache, it packs in 32 MB of L2 cache (8 x 2 MB for P-Cores / 4 x 4 MB for E-Cores) and 36 MB of L3 cache.

As the memory was running at DDR5-5600 speeds, it was unclear what setup was used as the testing was done. Regardless, with not-so-high clock speeds, the outcome for an ES chip is pretty remarkable as it achieved excellent performance. In addition, in Whetstone FP32 tests, along with a tremendous 2x gain in the FP64 tests, the Intel Core i9-13900 ‘Raptor Lake’ CPU presented up to 50% uplift in contrast with the Intel Core i9-12900 (Amazon). And astoundingly, the chip overcame the performances of both the Intel Core i9-12900 and AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (Amazon), and it is an absolute win regarding the upcoming lineup for the next generation.

As we can see, the Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 CPU ends up just 4-6% faster than Alder Lake; the given results, the overall performance was without the SIMD workload segment, and the results were only with non-SIMD code. It made it evident that after entering the SIMD workload segment, the overall performance leaped, and so did the Raptor Lake. With the advantage of having AVX-512 capabilities that both Alder Lake & Raptor Lake CPUs lack, the Intel Core i9-11900K (Amazon) does provide better performance. Looking at the rivalry, AMD is also not backing off; with the AVX-512 coming to Zen 4 CPUs; they are more likely to leave Raptor Lake behind with a significant lead in various segments.

Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 Leaked Benchmarks (Credits: SiSoftware)

As evident, the clock speeds play a significant role in the performance; it would be wise to wait for the results, and we should not be concluding with any specific result even though the Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 CPU performs well given its ES state. Regarding the Raptor Lake, SiSoftware has provided the following taglines:

• In legacy ALU/FPU tests, RPL shows a large 33-50% improvement over ADL even at lower clocks which is tremendous.
• In heavy vectorised/SIMD tests, RPL sees only 5-8% improvement over ADL (at lower clocks) which is encouraging but perhaps not a surprise as the extra Atom cores are not going to provide much uplift. We are waiting for additional benchmark results to have a better understanding.
• The huge L2 combined caches (16+16 = 32MB) and the increased L3 (36MB unified) finally overtake/match AMD’s Zen3 – but now with Zen2-3D V-Cache and forthcoming Zen4 (1MB L2 per core vs. 512kB) it may still not be enough.

Supported by the existing LGA 1700/1800 socketed platforms with DDR5 and DDR4 DRAM support, the Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake Desktop CPUs are expected to appear on the mainstream later this year. There is much to look forward to in terms of performance and boosts, as the other companies will also not back down from taking the limelight. But as it seems, the enthusiasts are head over heels for the upcoming projects, so let us see what it packs.

Intel Mainstream Desktop CPU Generations Comparison: