Does Intel Raptor Lake have a secret weapon 34-core CPU?
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Intel’s 13th-generation flagship scores with 24-cores, but a 34-core processor has been spotted from the Raptor Lake family in an odd twist.
That might lead you to immediately speculate that Intel has some sort of monster processor up its sleeve, ready to jump on AMD (and the rest of us, for that matter) as a surprise, but in fact this isn’t the case.
Let’s rewind to the beginning of the story here, that if Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) explains, will take place at Intel’s Innovation 2022 event. Team Blue showed a number of wafers here, one of which was found to contain unreleased Raptor Lake silicon, with larger dies than desktop models.
Not only did these CPUs have 34 cores as mentioned, but they were interconnected with a mesh — again, that’s different from standard Raptor Lake desktop chips — and carried eight DDR5 memory controllers.
Even Intel employees were confused as to what this wafer was, and theories were aired as to whether this was Ice Lake silicon, and not Raptor Lake, but those employees later clarified that these were indeed 13th-generation CPUs – with a ‘Raptor Lake-S 34 -Core’ label on the back of the outrigger carrier.
Analysis: Superfast Sapphire Rapids silicone rebranded?
So what is this mysterious CPU? Well, it’s a bigger die than the standard LGA 1700 socket in Z790 (Raptor Lake) and Z690 (Alder Lake) motherboards, meaning it won’t fit in desktop PCs.
So it looks like this is a chip destined for workstation computers and heavy use, which is backed up by the fact that these 34 cores are probably all performance cores (yes, all of them). The use of the mesh interconnect and the fact that there are no clusters of efficiency cores visible on the die strongly suggest that this is the case, and clearly no desktop processor would be built in that direction. As you probably know, Intel’s newly unveiled Raptor Lake-S desktop chips have no more than 8 performance cores (the 13900K flagship combines those with 16 more modest efficiency cores, to make a total of 24 cores as we mentioned at the outset).
Tom’s Hardware came to the conclusion that this is likely a Sapphire Rapids MCC die marked with Raptor Lake branding, destined for the workstation arena, and we have to agree that’s the only logical explanation. If true, having 34 full-on performance cores will no doubt mean this CPU is a truly blistering piece of silicon.
However, it must be said that it is strange that Intel would accidentally show a wafer for unreleased chips at its big event, but mistakes and leaks happen all the time in the tech world, of course.
As a final note, we know that Intel has another big gun for Raptor Lake waiting in the wings, namely the refresh of the flagship that will likely be called the 13900KS. However, this CPU retains the same core configuration as the 13900K. What it will do differently is boost to 6GHz out of the box, which is no small feat, and it’s likely Team Blue’s preemptive response to AMD’s 3D V-cache Ryzen 7000 models.