[PLUS] Intel Raptor Lake extended test: 13900K, 13700K, 13600K

The noose tightened

Just a few weeks ago, the competitor AMD presented its new AM5 platform including Ryzen 7000 CPUs and now Intel is following suit. Raptor Lake is the name of the 13th Core generation and this is the successor to Alder Lake, the hybrid architecture that ushered in a new era at Intel almost exactly a year ago. With Raptor Lake, the chip giant continues this development: There are more efficient cores, more cache, more of everything. We grabbed the three top models Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K and Core i5-13600K and sent them through our test course. Of course in an exciting comparison to AMD Zen 4. We would like to thank Intel for providing the Core i9-13900K and Core i5-13600K, as well as Asus for providing the Core i7-13700K.

Raptor does the honors

Intel has redesigned and improved almost every key area of ​​the Alder Lake architecture. The cornerstone is an improved manufacturing process, which we describe as “Intel 7+” for the sake of clarity. This brings with it the third generation of SuperFin transistors and ensures lower switching times overall, which improves latencies. Intel calls the performance cores Raptor Cove cores. They offer a more powerful design than the Golden Cove cores in the Alder Lake CPUs, which is noticeable in the clock frequency, among other things: Overall, the Raptor Cove is clocked up to 600 MHz higher. Furthermore, Intel has increased the L2 cache. If Golden Cove sets 1,280 KiByte per core, Raptor Cove has 2,048 KiByte, and the efficiency cores also have twice as much L2 cache with 2,048 KiByte to 4,096 KiByte in the Raptor design. The cache is accompanied by a new dynamic prefetcher algorithm called “L2P”.

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You will find the following products in the test:

• Intel Core i9-13900K
• Intel Core i7-13700K
• Intel Core i5-13600K

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