Intel’s Raptor Lake Core i9-13900K Spotted in the Wild, Still Too Early to Talk About Performance

Intel’s Core i9-13900K (the top-of-the-line Raptor Lake flagship) has already been spotted “in the wild!” And, well, that’s quite surprising seeing how there are so few 12th Generation Alder Lake processors on the market right now — both in terms of SKUs and quantities.

Now, we all know that companies constantly iterate and work on their products, but it’s still absurd that the next bleeding-edge behemoth is already being benchmarked when we haven’t even gotten our hands on its predecessors.

The market is in a truly baffling state, but at least there’s interesting things to report on and look forward to — even though none of them will reach consumer’s hands any time soon.

A Flagship Through and Through

This very first i9-13900K benchmark was discovered by Tom’s Hardware and, needless to say, we’re talking about a very potent CPU here. With a total of 24 cores (8 P-cores and 16 E-cores) and 32 threads, it is about as powerful as AMD’s top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 5950X.

Now, this is still a very early engineering sample and should not be taken overly seriously; its current numbers aren’t indicative of its eventual strength. What we do know is that it’ll feature updated P-cores based on the new Raptor Cove architecture (along with optimized Gracemont cores) which should result in noticeable performance gains compared to the i9-12900K — a processor that is already obscenely powerful and power-hungry. With a 50% increase in core and 33% increase in thread count, the Raptor Lake i9-13900K will be a veritable speed demon.

Something For Everyone

Details are still scarce, but we know that Intel plans on adhering to its current three segment SKU set-up: enthusiast models rated at 125W, consumer ones rated at 65W, and 35W low-powered CPUs for gaming laptops, mini PCs and ultrabooks.

The product line-up will be as follows:

• Intel Core i9 K-Series (8 Golden + 16 Grace) = 24 Cores | 32 Threads | 36 MB
• Intel Core i7 K-Series (8 Golden + 8 Grace) = 16 Cores | 24 Threads | 30 MB
• Intel Core i5 K-Series (6 Golden + 8 Grace) = 14 Cores | 20 Threads | 24 MB
• Intel Core i5 S-Series (6 Golden + 4 Grace) = 14 Cores | 16 Threads | 21 MB
• Intel Core i3 S-Series (4 Golden + 0 Grace) = 4 Cores | 8 Threads | 12 MB
• Intel Pentium S-Series (2 Golden + 0 Grace) = 4 Cores | 4 Threads | 6 MB

Fortunately, these powerful “monstrosities” will still support DDR4 RAM, although it’s fair to say that you’ll only be able to harness their true potential by using a kit of insanely fast DDR5 RAM.

All in all, Intel will bring the fight to AMD which should, in turn, result in lower prices and a more competitive state of affairs.

These Raptor Lake desktop processors are expected to launch in Q4 2022 (most of them, at least), but there’s a very good chance we’ll get a more thorough look at their updated architecture in just a few weeks at CES 2022, so stay tuned!