Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake: Everything you need to know about Intel’s next-gen processors

Intel’s latest 12th-gen Alder Lake CPUs are still relatively new to the market. Some of the Alder Lake chips including the Core i5-12600K and the Core i9-12900K are holding the top spots in our collection of the best CPUs you can buy. That being said, there’s no shortage of rumors and speculations about Intel’s next-generation chips.

In fact, there’s already a decent amount of info available about Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs, so we decided to create a page to detail all the relevant info. Here’s everything you need to know about the Intel 13th-gen Raptor Lake processors:

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Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake: Specifications

Raptor Lake CPUs, in case you don’t know, will be Intel’s 13th-generation processors. They’ll essentially be a follow-up to the Alder Lake CPUs that are dominating the performance charts right now. The Raptor Lake CPUs are expected to bring stronger performance with an enhanced 10nm design.

As a part of the Investors Meeting 2022, Intel officially demoed its first engineering sample of Raptor Lake CPU. This particular chip was equipped with a powerful 24-core processor with 32-threads. The processor is said to utilize the same hybrid architecture used by the Alder Lake chips, which means we’ll get to see the same combination of Performance (P-cores) and Efficiency (E-cores) working together for a great overall performance.

Another interesting thing about the Raptor Lake chips is that they’re also said to feature as many as 16 Efficient cores. This means we’re looking at twice as many small cores as the current-gen Alder Lake chips. This 24-core processor could be the one that Coelacanth-dream spotted. It’s presumed to be the Core i9-13900K, an upgrade to the current-gen Intel Core i9-12900K. Just to put things into perspective, Intel’s 12th-gen Core i9-12900K is a 16-core CPU with eight P and E cores each.

The first evidence of Intel’s 13th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs dates all the way back to a leak from March 2021. The leak, as you can see, reveals some official material on Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs. Chip-makers tend to plan and stay ahead of the launch cycles, so it’s not surprising to see documents about Raptor Lake surfacing way before the Alder Lake release.

Another piece of information worth noting is the code from Bootleg shows Raptor Lake without support for AVX-512. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise considering Alder Lake doesn’t support AVX-512 either. It’s still very early to tell whether Raptor Lake CPUs will support AVX-512 on hybrid chips, though. Intel may change its stance, so we’ll refrain from speculating this further, at least for now.

More recently, Intel started to tease some specifications that we can look forward to from 13th Gen. At a press tour in Israel, the company revealed that at least one of the 13th Gen Core i9 chips will boast a stock clock speed of 6GHz. Particularly interesting on that front is that AMD’s top Ryzen 9 7000 series CPU boasts a boost clock lower than this. Additionally, it’s claimed one of these 13th Gen chips has already been overclocked to a whopping 8GHz.

From the same event Intel also revealed some of the connectivity options that will be coming to Raptor Lake. These include Bluetooth LE Audio and Wi-Fi 7.

I’ll have more about this later, but some of the wireless connectivity improvements are coming to Intel 13th Gen.

Some exciting advances. #IntelTechTour pic.twitter.com/fJziF2xfZ2

— Daniel Rubino (@Daniel_Rubino) September 13, 2022

A recent ‘leak’ from Intel also detailed some additional specs for the Core i5 and Core i7 Raptor Lake CPUs, accidentally posting something it shouldn’t have. In that we see that indeed the top-end Core i9 will have 24-cores and 32-threads. The Core i5-13600K looks to come with 14-cores and 20-threads, while the Core i7-13700K is 16-cores and 24-threads. These are made up of six and eight performance cores respectively.

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Intel 13th-gen Raptor Lake: Socket Compatibility

Intel’s 13th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs will use the same LGA1700 CPU socket used by Alder Lake chips. This will come as a relief for those who are eyeing a Raptor Lake upgrade later this year. This also means you’ll be able to carry the existing LGA1700 motherboards and CPU coolers too,

This would also mean the upcoming chips will support DDR4 memory modules too, and there have been leaks to suggest this will be correct. But it’s not official until it’s official. There are currently no rumors or leaks pointing toward Intel’s plans to keep the LGA1700 socket for the 14th-gen Core processors too.

The LGA1700 socket codenamed “15R1”, is physically bigger than the LGA1200 socket. The new socket has more pins to support new features including DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0. Here’s a quick look at the specifications of the LGA1700 socket:

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Intel 13th-gen Raptor Lake: ‘Intel 7’ Process Node

Just like Alder Lake CPUs, Intel’s 13th-gen Raptor Lake chips will also use a 10nm SuperFin process known as Intel 7. However, it looks like Raptor Lake could be the last to utilize the 10nm node before the company’s transition to Intel 4. This will be a full node shrink with estimated performance gains up to 20%.

In comparison, AMD is set to use the TSMC 5nm in its upcoming Ryzen 7000 series CPUs.

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Intel 13th-gen Raptor Lake: Release Date

In the same presentation to investors, Intel discussed its CPU plans for the next few years. The plans highlighted four new generations of CPUs, and the company is planning to launch its 13th-gen Raptor Lake processors before the end of 2022.

This is in line with the earlier rumors too. If everything goes well, we should have the first set of 13th-gen Raptor desktop parts by the end of the third quarter this year. The mobile parts — including the H/P/U — should follow soon by the fourth quarter or by the end of 2022, at best. We’ll keep an eye on the launch details and update this space if/when more information is made available to us.

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Frequently Asked Questions about the Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors

We’re still a little time away from receiving any official info from Intel about the new Raptor Lake CPUs beyond the teasers recently given to press. We’ll continue to update this page with more info but in the meantime, be sure to check out our FAQ section below to find answers to some of the most popular questions around Raptor Lake chips:

• What socket will Intel 13th Gen use?
  – As we’ve mentioned in one of the sections above, Intel’s 13th gen Raptor Lake will use the same LGA1700 CPU socket used by Alder Lake chips. This means you’ll be able to carry your existing LGA1700 motherboards.
• Will Alder Lake CPU coolers work with Raptor Lake processors?
  – Yes, the CPU coolers that you may have just purchased for your Alder Lake-based PC build will also work with the next-gen Intel chips. This is because the 13th gen Raptor Lake processors also use the same LGA1700 CPU socket.
• Will Raptor Lake be based on the 7nm process?
  – No, the next-gen Intel Raptor Lake CPUs will be based on the same 10nm design (Intel 7) that Intel used for Alder Lake processors.
• Will Raptor Lake support DDR4 memory modules?
  – As of now, there’s no official confirmation about Raptor Lake chips supporting DDR4 memory. But leaks (such as the slide pictured above) suggest that 13th Gen will support DDR4-3200 as well as DDR5-5200.

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Closing Thoughts

Intel’s Alder Lake chips have already sent huge waves in the computing space with their performance. As we mentioned in our Intel Alder Lake review, the new chips offer a significant gen-on-gen performance improvement to trounce the competing Ryzen chips. We expect an incremental upgrade for Raptor Lake chips, but it’ll be interesting to see how they’ll compete with the new Ryzen 7000 series at the time to become our pick for the best gaming CPU.

There’s still much we don’t yet officially know about these new Intel chips, but expect to have more info soon, so stay tuned. All eyes are on AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series chips now, and it’ll be interesting to see how the CPU market will evolve over the next few months.