Today was the expected day and indeed the reference technology, the one that made processors what they are today, the creator of some of the most important chips in the history of technology, the very famous Intel, introduced Intel Raptor Lake-S, the thirteenth generation Intel Corewhich addresses the jump to hybrid architecture we saw last year with Alder Lake, and which responds to AMD being more competitive (that is, more eager to compete) with its newly released Ryzen, for its own reasons. 7000.

As I said, today was the expected day for the introduction of the Raptor Lake-S, but not only did we have the date of its announcement. In fact, and over the months, we’ve already learned more and more details about this new generation, to the extent that we were even able to compare the Raptor Lake specs with the Alder Lake specs recently. be able to assess the evolutionary leap between the two in some detail.

However, nothing is 100% official until its presentation, at which time a considerable amount of more than interesting information is also released, such as improvements to technologies already present in previous generations, utilities improving the management of new integrated , , etc. on. And of course performance, the clearest indicator of a generational leap for many users and one of the main elements of confrontation between different manufacturers for a long time.

We have to take into account, yes, Raptor Lake has some bridge generation, right It’s not a big technological leap like Alder Lake was and we hope Meteor Lake will be.. Be careful, I feel it is essential to clarify this at this point this is not necessarily a negative thing, despite the fact that there are those who connote it that way. The 13th generation Intel Core repeats the hybrid architecture model, but adds to it all the learning gained with Alder Lake, providing a platform that combines excellent performance with great reliability, as well as improvements in terms of efficiency.

The main sign that, as I mentioned before, we are facing a generational transition, is the top graph, in which Intel collects the most notable points of the Raptor Lake-S. As you can see, “Increase” and “Increase” are two of the most repeated words. More power, more reliability, improvements, improvements and more improvements. Something to keep in mind, starting with the Alder Lake base, which has been a reliable, high-performance generation since day one.

More cores and faster

We expected it and it happened. Raptor Lake-S comes from Intel Raptor Cove, a new architecture of powerful cores, directly responsible for the increase in IPC that we could already see in some of the recently leaked tests. This improvement in performance cores is of course responsible for the fact that with turbo mode the Raptor Lake-S can scale up to 5.8 GHz in turbo mode.

There is no news regarding the efficient cores that remain in the Gracemont architecture. But where there is no technological development is quantitative, as we see that the two top chips of this generation integrate 16 of them compared to the eight of the previous generation. Just because there is no evolutionary leap does not mean there are no improvements. Exactly opposite, these cores will be able to reach 4.3 gigahertz in turbo mode compared to 3.9 gigahertz which were limited in the previous generation.

Since then, it has also improved support for DDR5 memory The Raptor Lake-S has native support for DDR5 at 5,600 megahertz. On that note, while it’s been known for a long time, also confirm that the 13th generation retains DDR4-3200 compatibility, which will definitely end with this generation.

These improvements, to which we must also add the increase in the amount of buffer memory, which we will see in detail in the table of processors, according to Intel, bring an improvement in the performance of Raptor Lake-S, with respect to Alder Lake , up to 15% in monowire, which increases to a claimed 41% in multi-threaded mode.

The generation-to-generation performance figures are important, of course, but what the vast majority are really looking forward to is the comparison with AMD’s arch-rival. And in that regard, these are data provided by Intel regarding Ryzenin which we can also see an improvement over Alder Lake:

A tire ad campaign a few years ago said that power without control is useless, and ever since I heard that back then it’s always felt like a big hit. The Intel announced six processors todayand marking the debut of the Raptor Lake-S, share a K in their name, meaning they are unlocked and therefore suitable for overclocking.

And in this respect we find one of the most interesting novelties of this generationand the performance management tools for Raptor Lake-S based systems now provide basic level CPU performance monitoring as well as simplified management modes to help us optimize CPU performance. processor with one click. The combination of DDR5-5600 memories with XMP 3.0 will also allow us to overclock the memory in one click thanks to predefined profiles that assure us that we will get the best performance without sacrificing stability and even less. , the security of our system.

In terms of software improvements, and as my colleague Isidro mentioned a few months ago, we are also dealing with Intel Thread Director 2.0, a major revision of the software responsible for organizing and distributing workloads processor between the cores that make it up. Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence (machine learning), its functioning has been optimized on several levels, which should lead to higher efficiency of the orchestration process.

In addition, and we understand that thanks to the cooperation with Microsoft Intel is announcing specific improvements when using one of these new processors with Windows 11 22H2by optimizing tasks and services (either system-run or user-initiated) that are in the background but consume resources.

This whole suite of improvements translates not only to better performance, but as I hinted at the beginning, to greater efficiency, which we can quantify using the metric of power per watt/hour consumed. And in this regard, the data offered by Intel for the comparison of Raptor Lake-S and Alder Lake-S is more than remarkable, because as the table below shows, the current generation can provide consumption of 65 watts, performance similar to the previous one with 241 watts, almost 400%. This point no doubt has a lot to do with the learning that Alder Lake provides and the addition of more powerful cores.

Intel Raptor Lake-S: specifications and prices

The 13th generation Intel Core debuts with six integrated, although it is more accurate to speak of three, both with (K) and without (KF) integrated GPU versions. Let’s see what each of them offers us in detail:

• Intel Core i9-13900K: 24 cores and 32 threads. 8 high-performance Raptor Cove cores at 3GHz-5.8GHz, normal and turbo mode, 16 high-performance Gracemont cores at 2.2GHz-4.3GHz, normal and turbo mode, 68MB cache (L3 + L2) and TDP 125 watts. Integrated GPU Intel UHD Graphics 770. It has 24 cores and 32 threads. Price: 589 dollars.
• Intel Core i9-13900KF: 24 cores and 32 threads. 8 high-performance Raptor Cove cores at 3GHz-5.8GHz, normal and turbo mode, 16 high-performance Gracemont cores at 2.2GHz-4.3GHz, normal and turbo mode, 68MB cache (L3 + L2) and TDP 125 watts. No graphics. Price: 564 dollars.
• Intel Core i7-13700K: 16 cores and 24 threads. 8 high-performance Raptor Cove cores @ 3.4GHz-5.4GHz, normal and turbo mode, 8 high-performance Gracemont cores @ 2.5GHz-4.2GHz, normal and turbo mode, 54MB cache (L3 + L2 ) and a TDP of 125 watts. Integrated GPU Intel UHD Graphics 770. Price: 409 dollars.
• Intel Core i7-13700KF: 16 cores and 24 threads. 8 high-performance Raptor Cove cores @ 3.4GHz-5.4GHz, normal and turbo mode, 8 high-performance Gracemont cores @ 2.5GHz-4.2GHz, normal and turbo mode, 54MB cache (L3 + L2 ) and a TDP of 125 watts. No graphics. Price: 384 dollars.
• Intel Core i5-13600K: 14 cores and 20 threads. 6 high-performance Raptor Cove cores at 3.5 GHz-5.1 GHz, normal and turbo mode, 8 high-performance Gracemont cores at 2.6 GHz-3.9 GHz, normal and turbo mode, 44 MB cache (L3 + L2) and a TDP of 125 watts.
• Integrated GPU Intel UHD Graphics 770. Price: 319 dollars.
• Intel Core i5-13600K: 14 cores and 20 threads. 6 high-performance Raptor Cove cores at 3.5 GHz-5.1 GHz, normal and turbo mode, 8 high-performance Gracemont cores at 2.6 GHz-3.9 GHz, normal and turbo mode, 44 MB cache (L3 + L2) and a TDP of 125 watts. No graphics. Price: 294 dollars.

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