The most juicy bits of the Intel 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" launch press-deck just leaked, courtesy of Igor's Lab. They reveal the six SKUs Intel will debut the 13th Gen Core desktop processor series with, highlight key differences with the previous-gen "Alder Lake," and also detail what the new Intel Z790 chipset brings to the table. To begin with, the first-wave of 13th Gen Core processors will include six SKUs—the Core i9-13900K, i9-13900KF, i7-13700K, i7-13700KF, i5-13600K, and the i5-13600KF. The -K and -KF parts are identical to each other, spare for the lack of integrated graphics with the -KF ones.

Many of the key specs of these six SKUs were already leaked to the web along with those of several SKUs from future waves of 13th Gen SKUs, but this slide confirms a handful interesting specs related to power. The slide confirms 125 W as the Processor Base Power value for all six SKUs, 253 W as the Maximum Turbo Power value for the Core i9 and Core i7 K/KF SKUs; and 181 W as the Maximum Turbo Power for the Core i5 K/KF SKUs. This is a definite step up from the 241 W MTP for the previous-gen Core i9, 190 W MTP for the Core i7, and 150 W MTP for the Core i5. Of course, these limits are like a hedge blocking your path, you can relax them in the motherboard BIOS.The next slide details the key differences between the 12th Gen "Alder Lake" and 13th Gen "Raptor Lake." The maximum core-count has gone up to 8P+16E. The P-cores are upgraded with higher IPC and L2 cache; the E-cores are upgraded with higher L2 cache. The PCI-Express I/O from the CPU is unchanged—16 PCIe Gen 5 lanes for PEG, 4 PCIe Gen 4 lanes for CPU-attached M.2 NVMe. In contrast, the Ryzen 7000 is confirmed to feature Gen 5 CPU-attached M.2 NVMe. The DDR5 memory speed has been increased to DDR5-5600 native, up from DDR5-4800.

The slide detailing the new Intel Z790 chipset is most interesting. The chipset bus is unchanged at DMI 4.0 x8 (bandwidth comparable to PCI-Express 4.0 x8). While the previous-gen Z690 puts out 12x PCIe Gen 4 and 16x PCIe Gen 3 downstream lanes, the new Z790 puts out an impressive 20x PCIe Gen 4 and 8x PCIe Gen 3 lanes. The USB connectivity is mostly identical except that the Z790 puts out five 20 Gbps USB 3.2x2 ports, instead of four on the Z690.

Intel is expected to announce the 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processor series and Z790 chipset on September 27. The series will be expanded with more SKUs, and cheaper motherboard chipsets, such as the B760, later.