Core i9-13900K: Notable die shots of the Raptor Lake flagship

Twitter user “Fritzchens Fritz” took the opportunity of the Raptor Lake launch to publish die shots of the Core i9-13900K. As usual, the dies are ground to reveal the technology under a microscope. The 8 P-cores and the 16 E-cores, which are combined as four blocks of four, are clearly visible without question. Because of this and the enlarged caches, the CPU area at Raptor Lake is significantly higher than at Alder Lake.

It goes from 215.25 square millimeters up to 252.65 square millimeters. In addition to the 8 extra E cores, this is due to the L2 cache, which has been drilled from 14 to 32 MiB, and the L3 cache, which has grown from 30 to 36 MiB. A P core now measures 7.429 square millimeters; an E-core 1.58 square millimeters. Other than that, not much has changed at Raptor Lake compared to Alder Lake. The memory interface now supports DDR5-5600, but it hasn’t undergone a major conversion, which you would see in the pictures.

The 13th Core generation is built in Intel 7, formerly known as 10nm Enhanced SuperFin. For comparison, Ryzen is produced in TSMC’s 5 nm process. In the test, Intel’s Core i9-13900K proved to be surprisingly powerful, also in comparison to Ryzen 7000, but not as a cost despiser if you let the performance unbridled. In the test of the first Raptor Lake we report: “We can tell you without hesitation that you will currently find the maximum performance in the form of the Core i9-13900K. There are a few games where a Ryzen 7000 has the edge, but that’s the majority the games run (significantly) faster on the Intel CPU.” However, every user is recommended to adjust the CPU to their purposes so that the electricity bill does not escalate further.

Source: flickr