Whoopsies: Intel Self-Leaks Upcoming 13th Gen i5, i7, i9 CPU Specs

Beyond the eye-catching boasts of increased cores and threads, there isn’t a big killer feature here over what’s on the current 12th gen Alder Lake series, which made waves by introducing DDR5 support. In our own review of the 12th gen chips, we already felt Alder Lake was pretty damned future-proof, supporting PCIe Gen5 and Thunderbolt 4. And considering you’ll need to drop between $280 to $590 for any of the new mid-to-high end CPUs, these hybrid chips are going to be a big ask for many users out there.

And, of course, AMD has already rolled up to the corner, putting Intel on blast with its own upcoming Zen 4 CPU lineup, available at the end of this month. AMD’s claiming that its 7000 series chips will also allow boost clocks of over 5 GHz to match Intel, as well as support for PCIe5 and DDR5. It’s hard to judge their speeds versus Intel CPUs just based on cores and clock speeds, as we’re only working with pre-release material. What’s most important is pricing, with the highest end Ryzen 9 7950X costing $699 at launch. A top-of-the-line Core i9-12900K runs over $100 cheaper, so eyes are on Intel for how it prices Raptor Lake.

AMD also won’t have a 7800X CPU at launch, Sept. 27, which means that when it does eventually put out its mid-range CPU version, it’ll likely compete more with Intel’s 13th gen then it will with the 12th gen. And since you’ll likely need to upgrade your motherboard to support this new slate of gaming-ready CPUs, users will have an even bigger decision to make.

There’s some argument for further future-proofing your computer hardware, but we still don’t know pricing for those upcoming 13th gen processors or their release window. That, in my mind, is going to be the main deciding factor in whether there’s any reason to hold off upgrading if you haven’t already gone for a 12th gen and you’re absolutely set on Intel CPUs. And if you already have dropped several Benjamins on new chips, I have serious doubts that digging deeper into your wallet for the 13th gen will result in the kind of performance gains that demand spending even more right away.