Intel announces six 13th Gen processors arriving on October 20

After quite a few leaks and teasers, Intel has finally announced its 13th-generation processors codenamed Raptor Lake. The lineup will consist of 22 processors in total, six of which have been announced with the flagship, the i9-13900K hitting markets on October 20 priced at $589, the same price as its predecessor the i9-12900K. 

The announcement also comes the same day as AMD launches its latest Ryzen 7000 series of processors as the two companies battle it out for dominance over the PC market. 

There’s nothing new when it comes to the architecture, however. The Core i9-13900K will feature 24 cores (8P and 16E), 32 threads and can clock up to 5.8GHz. The new processors do, however, feature Intel’s Thread Director, an embedded microcontroller inside the processor that monitors threads and ensures they’re running on the right core for the job. 

For the six K series processors announced Tuesday, the company is claiming an improvement of up to 15% in single-threaded performance and 41% in multithreaded performance. 

Instead of just cramming more performance and efficiency cores in their processors, Intel has resorted to increasing only the efficiency cores which should theoretically improve multitasking and multithreaded app performance. There’s PCIe Gen 5 support with up to 16 lanes straight from the processor and support for DDR5-5200 and DDR5-5600 as well. The L3 and L2 caches have been increased as well and DDR4 compatibility has also been retained. 

The interesting thing however lies in the clock speeds, price and power draw. While the base frequencies for all the announced processors have been dropped, boost frequencies have improved coming up to 600MHz, 400MHz and 200MHz more on the new Core i9, i7 and i5 respectively as compared to their predecessors. 

Power requirements, however have moved up across the board. While all Core i5, i7 and i9 chips have a base power draw of 125 watts, the latter two need 253 watts to reach their maximum potential. However, power consumption only seems to go up if you’re really pushing these processors to their maximum potential. 

Intel claims that the i9-13900K can maintain its base wattage at just 65 watts, almost a quarter of what the i9-12900K needed at 241 watts. This means that unless you’re not pushing the CPU to its limit, they’re actually rather power efficient. 

Prices have also remained mostly the same across the board, at least for the six new processors that Intel unveiled despite the company’s warning of a price bump earlier this year. The only processor getting a price bump is the Core i5, with the Core i5-13600K jumping to $319 from $289 and the i5-13600KF jumping to $294 as compared to the $264 price tag on its predecessor.

Last but not least, Intel will also be launching the new 700 series chipsets with these processors. That said, existing 600-series motherboards will also support these new processors, but the new Z790 motherboards offer eight additional PCIe 4.0 lanes, better USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 ports coming at 20Gbps and DMI Gen 4.0. 

All six of the newly announced processors will start shipping on October 20 alongside the Z790 motherboards. Intel said they’d be sharing details about the rest of the 13th gen lineup later. 

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