As part of CES 2023, Intel announced the 65W family of desktop “Raptor Lake” CPUs for mainstream PCs, expanding their selection of 13th-gen Core desktop processors.
Our assessment of Intel’s recently released Core i9-13900K, aimed at PC gaming enthusiasts, reveals that it outperforms AMD’s Ryzen CPUs in a number of key metrics. Since most prebuilt PCs don’t have overclockable K-series processors, the 65W chips are likely to be what most users choose instead of the 650 Core i9-13900K.
The Core i9-13900, Intel’s flagship CPU, will be little less powerful than the Core i9-13900K. The maximum frequency of the Core i9-13900 is 5.6GHz (instead of 5.8GHz), and it can have up to 24 cores (8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores) and 32 threads. If it is anything like the Core i9-13900K, its performance will be boosted by the bigger level two cache (2MB per performance core and 4MB for every efficiency core cluster). The highest price tag will be 549.
We’ve included two slides below that showcase Intel’s various CPU families: the 35W T-series processors, designed for compact and low-power devices, and the F-series, which forgoes an integrated GPU to keep costs down. The most potent processors in this series are the Intel Core i9-13900, i7-13700, and i5-13600.
The 13th-generation Core family’s selling feature is the inclusion of additional efficiency cores, which assist enhance the processor’s performance when the CPU as a whole is being taxed heavily. With the Core i9 series, you may have up to 18MB extra L2 cache and eight more efficiency cores. It’s been announced that four additional E-cores will be added to the Core i7 series (which now maxes out at 5.2GHz in turbo mode). Meanwhile, the Core i5 family is getting an increase of eight efficiency cores that can boost performance by up to 39% compared to the previous generation.
Intel claims that the new Core i9-13900 would provide an increase of up to 11% in single-threaded performance and 34% in multi-threaded performance over the previous generation Core i9-12900K. It also uses less energy, which is a plus. According to Intel, the Core i9-13900 will provide up to 34% better multithreaded performance than the Core i9-12900 while using the same amount of power.