Intel Core i9-13900 ‘Raptor Lake’ Early CPU Sample Tested, Up To 50% Faster Than Core i9-12900 ‘Alder Lake’ at Just 3.7 GHz Clock Speeds

Intel Core i9-13900 ‘Raptor Lake’ Early CPU Sample Tested, Up To 50% Faster Than Core i9-12900 ‘Alder Lake’ at Just 3.7 GHz Clock Speeds

Intel Core i9-13900 'Raptor Lake' Early CPU Sample Tested, Up To 50% Faster Than Core i9-12900 'Alder Lake' at Just 3.7 GHz Clock Speeds 1

Intel’s Raptor Lake Desktop CPUs launch later this year to tackle AMD’s Zen 4 ‘Raphael’ lineup and it looks like SiSoftware has once again managed to publish a mini-review of a Core i9-13900 CPU with 24 cores and 32 threads in an early engineering state against Intel’s Alder Lake & AMD Zen 3 chips.

Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 ES CPU Up To 50% Faster Than Alder Lake Core i9-12900 At a Low Clock Speed of 3.7 GHz

The 13th Gen Intel Raptor Lake CPUs will be combing the new Raptor Cove P-Cores and Gracemont (E-Cores) in an optimized 10nm (Intel 7+) package. Compared to Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs, the Raptor Lake chips will come with a host of improvements besides just more cores and clock speeds. These include:

  • Support for up to DDR5-5600 memory (JEDEC)
  • 20% Larger L3 cache (Up To 36 MB Unified)
  • 2x Larger L2 cache (Up To 32 MB)
  • Support For AVX/AVX2 on E-Cores
  • No Support For AVX-512 (Just Like Alder Lake-S)

The Raptor Lake CPU sample tested is an Intel Core i9-13900 which features 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores for a total of 24 cores and 32 threads. The chip was running at max clock speeds of 3.7 GHz for the P-Cores and 2.76 GHz for the E-Cores. That’s really low from the retail version which will be offering over 5.5 GHz speeds as mentioned in various leaks. The CPU is equipped with 32 MB of L2 cache (8 x 2 MB for P-Cores / 4 x 4 MB for E-Cores) and 36 MB of L3 cache for a combined total of 68 MB of ‘Gaming’ cache.

Coming to the benchmarks, it is not mentioned what exact test setup was used and if the memory was indeed running at DDR5-5600 speeds. But with that said, the results are very impressive for an ES chip with such low clock speeds. The Intel Core i9-13900 ‘Raptor Lake’ CPU offered up to 50% uplift over the Intel Core i9-12900 in Whetstone FP32 tests and an impressive 2x gain in the FP64 tests. The chip ended up faster than both, the Intel Core i9-12900 and AMD Ryzen 9 5900X which is good for the upcoming lineup.

The results above were with non-SIMD code so entering the SIMD workload segment, the overall performance takes a hit and we see the Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 CPU ending up just 4-6% faster than Alder Lake. The Intel Core i9-11900K does deliver better performance thanks to its AVX-512 capabilities that are missing from Alder Lake & Raptor Lake CPUs. AMD also shows a huge lead here and with AVX-512 coming to Zen 4 CPUs, they can end up having a big lead over Raptor Lake in this particular segment.

Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 Leaked Benchmarks (Credits: SiSoftware)

Native Benchmarks Intel Core i9-13900 8C+16c/32T big+LITTLE (RPL) Intel Core i9-12900 8C+8c/24T big+LITTLE (ADL) Intel Core i9-11900K 8C/16T (RKL) AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12C/24T (Zen3) AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12C/24T (Zen3)
Native Dhrystone Integer (GIPS) 619 [+33%] 464 545 589 RPL is 33% faster than ADL
Native Dhrystone Long (GIPS) 648 [+34%] 485 551 594 A 64-bit integer workload RPL is 34% faster.
Native FP32 (Float) Whetstone (GFLOPS) 500 [+49%] 336 285 388 With floating-point, RPL is 50% faster
Native FP64 (Double) Whetstone (GFLOPS) 388 [+2x] 191 239 324 With FP64 RPL is 2x faster!
Native Integer (Int32) Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 1,945 [-7%] 2092 2000 2840 RPL is 7% slower than ADL here.
Native Long (Int64) Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 730 [+4%] 705 608 919 With a 64-bit, RPL is 4% faster.
Native Quad-Int (Int128) Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 138 [+8%] 128 160 173 Using 64-bit int to emulate Int128 RPL is 8% faster.
Native Float/FP32 Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 2,180 [+4%] 2089 1620 2000 In this floating-point vectorised test RPL is 4% faster
Native Double/FP64 Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 1,116 [+5%] 1063 806 1270 Switching to FP64 RPL is 5% faster
Native Quad-Float/FP128 Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 53 [+6%] 50 35.74 53.16 Using FP64 to mantissa extend FP128 RPL is 6% faster

So in conclusion, the Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 CPU, for its ES state, does perform really well but it would be better if we wait for the final performance numbers to show up since clocks do play a big role in the end. SiSoftware has given the following taglines in regards to Raptor Lake for now:

  • In legacy ALU/FPU tests, RPL shows a large 33-50% improvement over ADL even at lower clocks which is tremendous.
  • In heavy vectorised/SIMD tests, RPL sees only 5-8% improvement over ADL (at lower clocks) which is encouraging but perhaps not a surprise as the extra Atom cores are not going to provide much uplift. We are waiting for additional benchmark results to have a better understanding.
  • The huge L2 combined caches (16+16 = 32MB) and the increased L3 (36MB unified) finally overtake/match AMD’s Zen3 – but now with Zen2-3D V-Cache and forthcoming Zen4 (1MB L2 per core vs. 512kB) it may still not be enough.

The Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake Desktop CPUs are expected to launch later this year and will be supported by the existing LGA 1700/1800 socketed platforms with both DDR5 and DDR4 DRAM support.

Intel Mainstream Desktop CPU Generations Comparison:

Intel CPU Family Processor Process Processors Cores/Threads (Max) TDPs Platform Chipset Platform Memory Support PCIe Support Launch
Sandy Bridge (2nd Gen) 32nm 4/8 35-95W 6-Series LGA 1155 DDR3 PCIe Gen 2.0 2011
Ivy Bridge (3rd Gen) 22nm 4/8 35-77W 7-Series LGA 1155 DDR3 PCIe Gen 3.0 2012
Haswell (4th Gen) 22nm 4/8 35-84W 8-Series LGA 1150 DDR3 PCIe Gen 3.0 2013-2014
Broadwell (5th Gen) 14nm 4/8 65-65W 9-Series LGA 1150 DDR3 PCIe Gen 3.0 2015
Skylake (6th Gen) 14nm 4/8 35-91W 100-Series LGA 1151 DDR4 PCIe Gen 3.0 2015
Kaby Lake (7th Gen) 14nm 4/8 35-91W 200-Series LGA 1151 DDR4 PCIe Gen 3.0 2017
Coffee Lake (8th Gen) 14nm 6/12 35-95W 300-Series LGA 1151 DDR4 PCIe Gen 3.0 2017
Coffee Lake (9th Gen) 14nm 8/16 35-95W 300-Series LGA 1151 DDR4 PCIe Gen 3.0 2018
Comet Lake (10th Gen) 14nm 10/20 35-125W 400-Series LGA 1200 DDR4 PCIe Gen 3.0 2020
Rocket Lake (11th Gen) 14nm 8/16 35-125W 500-Series LGA 1200 DDR4 PCIe Gen 4.0 2021
Alder Lake (12th Gen) Intel 7 16/24 35-125W 600 Series LGA 1700/1800 DDR5 / DDR4 PCIe Gen 5.0 2021
Raptor Lake (13th Gen) Intel 7 24/32 35-125W 700-Series LGA 1700/1800 DDR5 / DDR4 PCIe Gen 5.0 2022
Meteor Lake (14th Gen) Intel 4 TBA 35-125W 800 Series? LGA 1851 DDR5 PCIe Gen 5.0 2023
Arrow Lake (15th Gen) Intel 20A 40/48 TBA 900-Series? LGA 1851 DDR5 PCIe Gen 5.0 2024
Lunar Lake (16th Gen) Intel 18A TBA TBA 1000-Series? TBA DDR5 PCIe Gen 5.0? 2025
Nova Lake (17th Gen) Intel 18A TBA TBA 2000-Series? TBA DDR5? PCIe Gen 6.0? 2026

The post Intel Core i9-13900 ‘Raptor Lake’ Early CPU Sample Tested, Up To 50% Faster Than Core i9-12900 ‘Alder Lake’ at Just 3.7 GHz Clock Speeds by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.

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