Intel’s 13th-gen processors are due to land at some point later this year, and what is purportedly the flagship Raptor Lake CPU has again been spotted, this time in a leaked Bootlog from the chip giant.
This was spotted by Coelacanth’s Dream (as highlighted by Tom’s Hardware) and it reinforces what has already been rumored about what will presumably be the Core i9-13900K, namely the core configuration and counts.
As detailed in the leak of the Bootlog, this Raptor Lake chip will have 24-cores, with 32-threads in total. That suggests the 13900K has 8 performance cores – mirroring Alder Lake, as expected, because the 13th-gen is a simple refresh of the current CPUs – and 16 efficiency cores (the latter don’t have hyper-threading, hence the thread count of 32).
Compared to Alder Lake, this means the flagship could run with the same amount of performance cores, but double up on the efficiency cores; a major boost on that front.
The clock speed of the engineering sample leaked – 1.8GHz – is obviously not what the finished processor will run at, and this is par for the course with a chip in development that’s still some way off release.
Also of interest here is that Raptor Lake doesn’t support AVX-512 instructions, but then neither does Alder Lake – officially, anyway – so this is no surprise, again remembering that the next-gen chips will essentially be the same as current 12th-gen models at heart (so rumor has it), just revamped and honed for better performance.
Analysis: More evidence of how much bite to expect from Raptor Lake flagship
The configuration of 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores has been seen before in leaks of the purported Raptor Lake flagship, which most recently included a spilled benchmark. So this latest sighting – even though we must take it with caution, as ever – adds to the evidence pile that this will be the configuration of the top-end 13th-gen processor.
Performance will be boosted in the next-gen flagship CPU not just due to it potentially having a lot more efficiency cores, but also with Intel likely being able to push clock speeds just a little more, and moreover the architectural refinements that’ll deliver more IPC (Instructions per Clock).
Of course, this Bootlog sighting is also a sign of Intel’s progression moving ahead nicely with Raptor Lake, which will hopefully be here sooner than we think in 2022 – the rumor mill has indicated that a Q3 launch is possible.
During CES 2022 earlier this week, Team Blue confirmed that Raptor Lake is on track, but as we don’t have an official launch timeframe beyond it happening later this year, we still don’t know for sure whether that might be Q3 or Q4.