Alder Lake processors may rank among the best gaming CPUs you can buy today, but their time in the spotlight is almost over, as the Raptor Lake release date is just around the corner. Now, with the launch of the company’s soon-to-be best gaming CPUs drawing ever closer, new details have emerged on the kind of performance and specs we can expect from the second generation LGA 1700 chips.
New specification and benchmark data on the Alder Lake successor arrives courtesy of SiSoftware, giving us our first in-depth look at a high-end Raptor Lake flagship processor, the Core i9 13900 (via Videocardz). The CPU features eight performance and 16 efficiency cores, 24 in total and 8 more than its predecessor, the i9 12900. Additionally, the chip’s L3 cache is 20% larger and supports DDR5 gaming RAM up to 5,600MHz (up from 4,800 on 12th Gen).
These Raptor Lake i9 13900 specs translate into a 33-50% performance improvement in ALU/FPU tests in the SiSoftware Sandra benchmarking software, versus its Alder Lake predecessor. Meanwhile, other vectorised/SIMD tests netted 5-8% gains.
It’s unclear how these specs will affect real-world performance in the best PC games or widely used productivity applications, but it shouldn’t be long before we see Raptor Lake productivity and gaming benchmarks.
At the very least, if Intel hopes to gain a coveted spot in your gaming PC setup with Raptor Lake, it will need to craft chips that compete with upcoming AMD Zen 4 CPUs. Team red’s processors will hopefully launch later this year, and the company has already shared details on when Zen 5 components will ship and what’s going on under the hood (or lid, in this case).