Intel Announces 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" - Linux Benchmarks To Come

Monday saw the AMD Ryzen 7000 series review embargo lift and retail availability beginning today for those Zen 4 desktop CPUs. Intel meanwhile is using today -- the first day of their second annual Innovation event in San Jose -- to announce 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors for aiming to take AMD's Zen 4 head-on.

Intel Raptor Lake aims to provide the "world's best gaming experience" at least with the Core i9 13900K that Intel compared to the Ryzen 9 5950X given the launch only this week of the AMD Ryzen 7000 series.

The new Raptor Lake processors feature larger caches, higher core/thread counts, and higher clock speeds over Alder Lake. With Raptor Lake the P cores can top out at 5.8GHz, the E core count has doubled for offering up to 24 cores / 32 threads on top-end Raptor Lake desktop processors, and up to 2MB of L2 cache per P-core and 4MB of cache per E-core cluster.

Intel is talking up to 15% better single threaded performance and 41% multi-threaded performance for the Core i9 13900K over the i9-12900K. Raptor Lake also supports native DDR5-5600 support and is using 8 P cores / 16 E cores for Core i9 SKUs and 6 P / 8 E cores for the Core i5 SKUs. The Intel Core i9 13900K will feature clock speeds up to 5.8GHz and a 600MHz higher turbo frequency than the i9-12900K. The Core i7 13700K meanwhile has a 400Hz higher turbo frequency. Raptor Lake is built atop an upgraded Intel 7 process.

The Intel Z790 chipset is also rolling out as an upgrade over the Z690 series that now allows for additional PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes as well as increased USB 3.2 / Gen 2x2 20 Gbps connectivity.

Intel heavily talked up the gaming potential for Raptor Lake in their pre-brief but also the productivity / content creation performance was also talked up. Intel is promoting the Core i9 13900K as up to 24% better gaming performance and up to 34% faster creator workflows. Of course, all of Intel's pre-brief benchmarks were under Windows.

Raptor Lake pricing has the Core i9 13900K flagship launching at ~$589 USD, which if true is quite competitively priced while early listings today have shown the i9-13900K being listed for closer to $650.

Those are the highlights of Raptor Lake for today. Stay tuned for when the processors are available in retail channels and the new Raptor Lake hardware is in the lab for Linux performance benchmarking and support testing. As always, will put the new processors through their paces under Linux. Raptor Lake retail availability is slated for 20 October.