As we draw closer to the release of Intel’s next 13th-gen chips, leaks are happening more often. New tests of an i9-13900 engineering sample reveal that the addition of eight more E-cores will significantly improve the CPU’s multi-threaded performance.
Even though the 13th-generation Raptor Lake CPUs from Intel have not yet been released, a Chinese tech website managed to get and test an early sample of the i9-13900.
It has twice as many performance cores than its predecessor, the i9-12900, with 8 Performance cores and an astounding 16 efficient cores. Raptor Cove, a new microarchitecture for the P-cores, and more L2 and L3 cache are two further noteworthy distinctions.
In testing, ExpReview discovered that the unannounced CPU is unexpectedly already supported on a current-gen Z690 motherboard. The large cores can only turbo to 3.8 GHz, though, as this is an engineering prototype.
The additional E-cores in the i9-13900 allow it to perform applications benchmarks 20% quicker than an i9-12900K locked at the same frequency. When it comes to single-threaded tasks and gaming, the Raptor Lake chip is a little slower than its predecessor, but we can probably blame this on the microcode’s incomplete development and the absence of adequate BIOS support.
This week, Intel also released an update for its Extreme Tuning Utility that added support for “Efficient Thermal Velocity Boost” and a few additional overclocking features. A high-end Raptor Lake SKU (perhaps the i9-12900KS successor?) may leverage these characteristics to accelerate up to 6 GHz on one or two cores, according to a hardware leaker.
To read our blog on “Clock speeds could be increased by 20% with Intel 4 process node,” click here.
