Why Intel Raptor Lake’s disappointing laptop CPU benchmarks don’t add up

Intel’s Raptor Lake processors for laptops have been spotted in a number of leaked benchmarks, giving us a potential idea of ​​their performance – and at first glance it looks seriously underwhelming, but there’s more to it than meets the eye, like we will discuss shortly.

First, let’s take a look at the benchmarks themselves, which come from mobile CPUs running on a Samsung laptop. Namely, the beefy Core i9-13900HK and the Core i7-13700H, both of which appeared in Geekbench 5, as Benchleaks emphasized in a couple (opens in new tab) from tweets (opens in new tab) (through Wccftech (opens in new tab)). Handle all of this with caution, as with all spilled benchmarks.

The pre-release example 13900HK, which has 14 cores and 20 threads (meaning 6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores), registered a result of 1,817 for single-thread and 11,799 for multi-thread.

The Core i9-13900HK reached close to 5.4 GHz for maximum boost during benchmarking, averaging just under 5.3 GHz.

As for the Core i7-13700H, this laptop CPU has the same core configuration as the Core i9 above, achieving a score of 1,768 for single-threaded performance and 10796 for multi-threaded.

This 13700H achieved a top boost speed of almost 5GHz during benchmarking, and averaged at 4.9GHz.

Analysis: Big boost, but shaky performance? And the mystery of the ‘T’

Seeing a boost from 5.4GHz – still in a relatively early stage – for the Core i9-13900HK is pretty impressive, as if you remember, the 12900HK boosts to 5GHz so it’s quite a step up. That said, Geekbench’s results are disappointing at first glance, as these laptop processors are slower than their Alder Lake counterparts. However, this is still an early sample CPU and there is clearly still work to be done – we can expect much faster results as Raptor Lake mobile gets closer to release.

Furthermore, there’s a notable quirk here, as the more eagle-eyed will have noticed, which is that the Intel processors are labeled as “CoreT” rather than just Core in these leaked benchmarks. So, is this a new brand of mobile chip? After all, Intel just announced the future rebranding of its Celeron and Pentium parts for laptops, as you may recall, with those names retired – so this has led some to speculate about what’s going on here.

Well, we highly doubt that anything will change here. CoreT is a clunky-looking name, and furthermore, throughout the Celeron renaming, Intel made it clear that the Core family (and vPro) would remain exactly as they are, without any changes. Intel also already has a T-series of lower power (slower clocked) chips, so this would seemingly be confusing (the ‘T’ in those CPUs comes at the end of the processor name, not after Core, too).

As Wccftech points out, the most likely thing that should have said ‘TM’ here – as in trademarked – is on Geekbench, and the ‘M’ was skipped. Either it is at least a bug, or this could even indicate that the benchmarks are fake (always a possibility).

Other than that, there’s a bit more confusion here: the cache sizes specified are the same as Alder Lake, rather than Raptor Lake, which bolsters things a bit in this area. This could indicate that Raptor Lake Mobile is a direct and simple refresh of Alder Lake, which again would be disappointing, but we think it’s too early to draw such conclusions.

Or, as Wccftech theorizes, there could be CoreT components as a simple refresh, as well as real Raptor Lake mobile CPUs (with the larger cache sizes). But we’re not buying this for all the reasons we’ve just discussed, and of course it would greatly complicate things for consumers.

We should see more leakage on the laptop processor front for Raptor Lake in the near future, and that will no doubt help clarify some of the more sketchy points these benchmarks have raised. However, we’re pretty sure that CoreT is a red herring, and we’re sure that these mobile CPUs will be much faster than this when the release comes. They must be, very simple.