Just a few hours after the Intel Core i9-13900 Raptor Lake CPU leaked, a full performance preview has been published by Expreview.

Intel Core i9-13900K 'Raptor Lake' ES CPU Is 20% Faster Than Core i9-12900K 'Alder Lake' In Multi-Threaded Benchmarks

The Intel Core i9-13900 'Raptor Lake' CPU tested is an engineering sample like the one we saw earlier. It features an 8+16 core configuration. These include 8 P-Cores based on the Raptor Cove and 16 E-Cores based on the Gracemont core architecture.

The Core i9-13900 Raptor Lake CPU carries 16 MB of L2 cache for the P-Cores (2 MB per core) and 16 MB of L2 cache for the E-cores too (4MB per cluster of 4 cores). This gives us a total of 32 MB of L2 cache which combined with the L3 cache will offer us a total of 68 MB of cache which is rumored to be labeled as 'Game Cache'.

Intel's Core i9-13900 Raptor Lake CPU is pictured on the left and Alder Lake Core i9-12900K on the right. (Image Credits: Bilibili)

In terms of clock speeds, the Intel Core i9-13900 Raptor Lake CPU has a clock speed that's rated at 3.8 GHz. Do note that the P-Cores for this engineering sample ran at a base clock of 1.4 GHz and a max boost clock of 3.8 GHz (P-Cores) while the E-Cores were split with 2 clusters running at 2.8 GHz and the other 2 clusters running at 1.0 GHz so we can already see some inconsistency in the clock speeds. This is a Non-K 65W part so it will carry a much lower clock speed plus it is also an ES chip (engineering sample) so clocks are expected to be lower. The final chips are expected to yield clock speeds of up to 6 GHz.

Both the Intel Core i9-13900 'Raptor Lake' and Core i9-12900K 'Alder Lake' CPUs were tested on the Z690 platform with a pair of G.Skill DDR5-5200 memory and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. The Raptor Lake chip has not been released yet so there's no proper BIOS available for it yet. As such, clock speeds shouldn't be as stable as the final chip. For testing, Expreview had the Core i9-12900K locked at 3.8 GHz across all cores for a fair comparison.

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Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 vs Alder Lake Core i9-12900K (3.8 GHz Fixed) CPU Benchmarks

In terms of performance, the single-core performance of Intel's Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 CPU is slower than the Alder Lake Core i9-12900K chip. This is because the Alder Lake CPU also has the full backing of an optimized BIOS and a higher TDP limit versus the Non-K Raptor Lake chip. And also, as said before, the clock speeds for the Raptor Lake CPU aren't stable. In multi-threading tests, the 50% higher core count does boost the performance by 20% but the final retail chips should offer even better performance.

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Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900 vs Alder Lake Core i9-12900K (3.8 GHz Fixed) Gaming Benchmarks

Looking at the gaming benchmarks, the Intel Core i9-13900 is mostly on par with the Core i9-12900K and the differences are within the margin of error. With that said, Raptor Lake CPUs are going to offer increased cache and faster clock speeds which should tremendously help in games. There are recent rumors that we will be getting up to 6 GHz clock speeds on the flagship SKU. The Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake Desktop CPUs are expected to launch later this year and will be supported by the existing LGA 1700/1800 socketed platforms with both DDR5 and DDR4 DRAM support.

Intel Mainstream CPU Generations Comparison: