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Intel’s Raptor Lake processors have been leaked by the company itself, showing off the flagship CPU and two others, complete with what can be assumed to be the latest core counts and maximum boost speeds.
This appears to be an erroneous update to an official Intel guide to choosing the right gaming CPU, and part of the article for the company’s Canadian site lists three 12th-generation (current Alder Lake) spec. models discussed. Apart from the accidental update the page has instead inserted a trio of incoming Raptor Lake models, namely the Core i5-13600K, Core i7-13700K and flagship Core i9-13900K.
The bug was fixed and the page was reverted to show the Alder Lake chips, but not before hardware leaker @momomo_us screen grabbed the details (as indicated by VideoCardz (opens in new tab)).
As you can see, the 13900K is shown with 24 cores and 32 threads, and a maximum boost clock of 5.4GHz for the performance cores. That means, as rumor has it, it’s a chip with 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores (the latter have no hyper-threading, hence the 32 threads).
The 13700K is listed with 16 cores and 24 threads – so 8 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores – with a top boost of 5.3 GHz (for the performance cores). And the 13600K offers 14 cores and 20 threads – meaning 6 cores of performance and 8 efficiency – with a maximum boost of up to 5.1 GHz.
All of this comes with the caveat that this faulty spec update could contain bugs, or at least that’s a possibility, albeit not a probable one we’d hope.
Analysis: Greater boost speeds are still in the cards
If you’re fiddling with a page update like this, it suggests that Raptor Lake’s supposedly imminent launch – thought to be taking place at Intel’s Innovation event on September 27, just two weeks away from now. – indeed continues as rumours. Because if Intel gets updates like this one right now for its website, the reveal will probably come soon enough. (The chips won’t go on sale until later, mind you, if the vine is right – maybe around mid-October or a little later).
This also more or less confirms – salt added as always – that one of the first CPUs we will see is the trio of the 13900K, 13700K and 13600K, which is of course expected, as they represent the flagship and main workhorses of the 13th . gene range. Note that there may be more Raptor Lake processors to kick-start the next-gen action – in fact that is very probably – and rumors initially point to 12 consumer models (six, actually, since half are just ‘F’ variants that are the same as the stock CPU, just without the integrated graphics).
If you’re disappointed by the boost speeds shown in this leak, keep in mind that this is the maximum Turbo clock frequency and the 13900K could be higher than 5.4GHz, for example. The more commonly (and long) rumored 5.8GHz is the true top speed, but that only happens with TVB (for a short burst, in other words, as long as the thermals allow).
So don’t think the rumor mill has overstated boost speeds, because as far as the latest leaks show, the flagship will hit 5.8GHz, and this leak from Intel doesn’t contradict that. (It’s worth noting that this also tells us that Intel’s reveal that a Raptor Lake CPU will hit 6GHz out of the box pertains to the 13900KS, which will be a later special edition of the 13900K).
That said, we’ve seen speculation about an all-core boost speed of 5.5GHz for the 13900K, and this official – well, still semi-official technical – figure of 5.4GHz seems to pay off for that idea.
That in no way lowers expectations of the kind of performance we’ll see from Raptor Lake, mind, and effectively illustrates why spreading rumors should always be viewed with great caution. Of course, even this leak needs to be handled with some care, as we’ve pointed out.
The general mood of recent Raptor Lake rumours, however, raises some pretty positive expectations, in terms of performance – and especially since the 13th generation is a much better prospect for overclocking than Alder Lake. PC enthusiasts will then no doubt be happy to see these processors go on sale, although AMD’s next-generation Ryzen 7000 CPUs (Zen 4) are also building similar expectations of a robust step forward—in terms of overall performance, not overclocking—compared to the current Zen 3 based chips.