An Intel Core "Raptor Lake" engineering sample was de-lidded by Expreview giving us a first look at what will be Intel's last monolithic silicon client processor before the company switches over to chiplets, with its next-generation "Meteor Lake." The chip de-lidded here is the i9-13900, which maxes out the "Raptor Lake-S" die, in featuring all 8 "Raptor Cove" P-cores and 16 "Gracemont" E-cores physically present on the die, along with 36 MB of shared L3 cache, and an iGPU based on the Xe-LP graphics architecture.

The "Raptor Lake-S" silicon is built on the same Intel 7 (10 nm Enhanced SuperFin) silicon fabrication node as "Alder Lake-S." The "Raptor Lake-S" (8P+16E) die measures 23.8 mm x 10.8 mm, or 257 mm² in area, which is 49 mm² more than that of the "Alder Lake-S" (8P+8E) die (around 209 mm²). The larger die area comes from not just the two additional E-core clusters, but also larger L2 caches for the E-core clusters (4 MB vs. 2 MB), and larger L2 caches for the P-cores (2 MB vs. 1.25 MB); besides the larger shared L3 cache (36 MB vs. 30 MB). The "Raptor Cove" P-core itself could be slightly larger than its "Golden Cove" predecessor.

According to sources close to Igor Wallossek from Igor's lab, Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist discrete graphics card lineup is in trouble. As the anonymous sources state, certain add-in board (AIB) partners are having difficulty adopting the third GPU manufacturer into their offerings. As we learn, AIBs are sitting on a pile of NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. This pile is decreasing in price daily and losing value, so it needs to be moved quickly. Secondly, Intel is reportedly suggesting AIBs ship cards to OEMs and system integrators to start the market spread of the new Arc dGPUs. This business model is inherently lower margin compared to selling GPUs directly to consumers.

Last but not least, it is reported that at least one major AIB is stopping the production of custom Arc GPUs due to quality concerns. What this means is yet to be uncovered, and we have to wait and see which AIB (or AIBs) is stepping out of the game. All of this suggests that the new GPU lineup is on the verge of extinction, even before it has launched. However, we are sure that the market will adapt and make a case for the third GPU maker. Of course, these predictions should be taken with a grain of salt, and we await more information to confirm those issues.

Although Intel threw in the towel and gave up on making routers and gateways back in 2020, the company is still the world's largest manufacturer of WiFi modules for computers. Now news out of Korea suggests that Intel's first WiFi 7 products will be launched in 2024, about a year after the expected availability of the first WiFi 7 routers and gateways. That said, based on a quote from Eric McLaughlin, vice president of Intel's wireless solutions division, who attended an unspecified press conference in the APAC region, Intel "expect it to appear in major markets in 2025." This suggests that it'll be a late 2024 launch and we might see competitors' products in notebooks and PCs way ahead of Intel this time around.

That said, the WiFi 7 standard is currently only in the late stages of development, despite Broadcom, MediaTek and Qualcomm having announced multiple products already. It's likely we'll see another round of draft spec hardware launching either later this year, or next year, with the final WiFi 7 spec not expected to be ratified until 2024. As such, Intel may be later than its competitors, but should hopefully launch a feature complete product. Intel's products should support speeds of up to 5.8 GHz, although this would be using a 320 MHz wide channel and 4K QAM, which means these speeds will be limited to a few meters from a router. WiFi devices have a history of quirky issues between brands, even if none of them have been so severe that a fallback to an older standard hasn't solved the problem, but it's still been a hassle for consumers. Hopefully WiFi 7 won't repeat history, but we wouldn't place a bet on it.

Based on a report by TrendForce, Intel has yet again had to push back its upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs and it now appears that Intel will only be launching Meteor Lake towards the end of 2023. It's unclear why there has been yet another delay, but Intel is said to have cancelled most of its orders with TSMC for the 3 nm tGPU that Intel will have made at TSMC, for 2023. The knock-on effect of this, is that TSMC is said to be slowing down its production line expansion towards 3 nm, as the company is now unsure if it'll be able to fill its order books for all of 2023. TSMC's main customer for the 3 nm node is still going to be Apple, but with the loss of what is likely to be around six months worth of production from Intel, TSMC is said to be considering cutting its CapEx for 2023.

TSMC's other customers, such as AMD, MediaTek and Qualcomm aren't planning on moving to 3 nm until 2024, so unless there's a change in plans from either of these companies, or increased demand from Apple, TSMC is said to hit the brakes when it comes to starting up new, cutting edge production lines next year. TSMC is also likely to see reduced revenues during 2023 due to Intel's change of plans, although it's too early to make any assumptions. TrendForce also suggests that Intel might still use TSMC's 3 nm node as a backup plan, if Intel would fail to execute on moving to the Intel 4 process, but considering how complex it is to move a design between different foundry processes, this seems unlikely.

The second company to launch an Intel Arc A380 graphics card is somewhat surprisingly, if already rumoured, ASRock. The card in question goes under the somewhat awkward name of Intel Arc A380 Challenger ITX 6GB OC or A380 CLI 6GO for short. Unlike the Gunnir card, this is a rather compact, Mini-ITX friendly card that measures 190 x 124 x 39 mm and sports a single fan. Despite its diminutive size, it's still a dual slot card and ASRock outfitted it with a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, just as Gunnir did with its card.

The base frequency is somewhat higher at 2250 MHz vs. 2000 MHz for the Gunnir card, although ASRock doesn't mention the boost clock on its website. As the name implies, the card comes with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory with a rated data rate of either 15 or 15.5 Gbps, as both numbers are mentioned by ASRock, still on a 96-bit bus. The card has a single HDMI 2.0b port and three DisplayPort 2.0 ports with DSC. The card obviously has a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface as well. ASRock has implemented a 0dB mode where the fan stops spinning during low loads. According to Videocardz, the ASRock Intel Arc A380 Challenger ITX 6GB OC is already on sale in the PRC for the equivalent of US$192.

Last week's news about Mediatek signing an agreement to use Intel's Foundry Services (IFS) led to some speculation as to what Mediatek would be manufacturing at IFS. Details have now emerged in the Taiwan press about Mediatek's plans and the first products will be using the Intel 16 process, what was previously known as its 22 nm node. As such, we're not talking about anything cutting edge or even remotely close, but that's hardly a problem for Mediatek, as the company makes a vast range of products suitable for the node.

MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai mentioned that IFS will be used for producing semiconductors for digital TVs and wireless access networks at an investor conference in Taiwan. This suggests that most of the components might not even be for Mediatek itself, but rather its subsidiaries, such as MStar or Airoha. MStar is a company that produces a wide range of lower-end smart TV chips, whereas Airoha has ended up taking over Mediatek's networking and Bluetooth business units. Admittedly, Mediatek still has some of these types of products under its own brand, but these tend to be higher-end products that would require a more advanced node than 22 nm in most cases. Mediatek's move to IFS has raised concerns in Taiwan that the smaller foundries might be losing business from Mediatek over time, which means that UMC and PSMC are going to be on the losing end of this deal.

Colorful Technology Company Limited, a professional manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards, all-in-one gaming and multimedia solutions, and high-performance storage, announce the launch of the COLORFUL X15-AT 22 gaming laptop equipped with a 12th generation Intel Core i9 processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics. The COLORFUL X15-AT 22 is coming to the United States via Newegg.

The COLORFUL X15-AT 22 is equipped with the latest 12th generation Intel Core i9-12900H processor with 8 cores and 16 threads, and a maximum boost clock of 4.60 GHz. The gaming laptop is also fitted with 16 GB of DDR4-3200 memory - upgradeable to 64 GB. For storage, the X15-AT 22 packs a 512 GB PCIe Gen4 SSD. The X15-AT 22 also features a Thunderbolt 4 port with up to 40 Gbps transfer speed.

Intel is reportedly moving the general availability of its 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processor, codenamed "Sapphire Rapids," in the region of early-February to early-March, 2023. The enterprise processors were expected to debut toward the end of 2022, and some of the oldest company roadmaps referencing the processor put its launch back in Q1-2021. Igor's Lab reports that there are as many as 12 steppings of the processor, with the latest discovered being the E5 (the others being A0, A1, B0, C0, C1, C2, D0, E0, E2, E3 and E4; although these could be validation samples handed out to various large customers of Intel to try these chips with their various applications. Built on the Intel 7 node, the processor features up to 60 "Golden Cove" CPU cores, a DDR5 memory interface, PCI-Express Gen 5, and various on-die accelerators. Certain variants even feature up to 32 GB of on-package HBM.

Intel yesterday confirmed its plans to extend its Meteor Lake architecture towards shores other than general processing. According to Phoronix, Intel posted a new driver that lays the foundations for VPU (Versatile Processing Unit) support under Linux. The idea here is that Intel will integrate this VPU within its 14th Gen Meteor Lake architecture, adding AI inferencing acceleration capabilities to its silicon. A sure-fire way to achieve enormous gains in AI processing, especially in performance/watt. Interestingly, Intel is somewhat following Apple's footsteps here, as the company already includes AI-dedicated processing cores in its desktop/laptop Apple Silicon processors since the M1 days.

Intel's VPU architecture will surely be derived from Movidius' designs, which Intel acquired back in 2016 for a cool $400 million. It's unclear which parts of Movidius/Intel IP will be included in the VPU units to be paired with Meteor Lake: whether a full-blown, SoC (System on Chip)-like VPU design such as the Myriad X VPU, or if Intel will take select bits of the architecture (plus the equivalent of five additional years of research and development), sprinkling them on top of their upcoming architecture. We do know the VPU itself will include a memory management unit, a RISC-based microcontroller, a Neural Compute System (what exactly entails this compute system and its slices is the mysterious part) and network-on-chip capabilities.

ASUS today announced ASUS Chromebook CX1, an all-new lightweight and sustainable laptop with trendy aesthetics, and designed to empower modern on-the-go lifestyles. With up to a bright, clear FHD 14-inch display, ASUS Chromebook CX1 is powered by up to a quad-core Intel Pentium Silver processor. It's also engineered with WiFi 6 (802.11ax) and a long-lasting battery that delivers up to 12 hours of productivity on a single charge, handing users the freedom to breeze through everyday tasks. A 180° hinge allows it to be fully opened and laid completely flat on a desk or table, making it easy to share ideas, visuals, samples and designs when working with friends, colleagues or clients.

With smooth performance, robust security and convenient features, ASUS Chromebook CX1 is perfect for empowering seamless entertainment and productivity for everyone—and primed for the post-pandemic world of hybrid work and learning. ASUS Chromebook CX1 embodies pure style with a distinctively trendy look and feel. The lightweight, 1.47 kg design also embraces sustainability, incorporating recycled materials to make it more environmentally friendly. The 180° hinge allows the device to be laid completely flat on a desk, table or lap, making it easy to collaborate and share content with nearby friends or colleagues.

Intel's pioneering 3D X-point Memory, which sought to bridge the gap between non-volatile Flash memory, and volatile DRAM, stares at an untimely demise, as Intel plans to wind up both its Optane Memory business, as well as further development of 3D XPoint. The industry's reception of Optane Memory has been lukewarm; while cheap NVMe SSDs have driven Optane out of the client segment. Intel in its Q2-2022 Financial Results release, announced that it has initiated the winding down of the Optane Memory business, and that the company is incurring a $559 million "Optane Memory Impairment" charge this quarter.

3D XPoint faces technological competition from the latest crop of 3D-stacked Flash memory, which is achieving over 200 layers of density; while the latest generation of PCI-Express Gen 5.0 controllers enable data-rates in excess of 10 GB/s, and certain enterprise-relevant features of PCIe Gen 5. In a statement released to AnandTech, Intel says: "We continue to rationalize our portfolio in support of our IDM 2.0 strategy. This includes evaluating divesting businesses that are either not sufficiently profitable or not core to our strategic objectives. After careful consideration, Intel plans to cease future product development within its Optane business. We are committed to supporting Optane customers through the transition."

ASUS today announced the refreshed 13-inch ExpertBook B5, an ultralight, kilogram-class laptop series available in both traditional clamshell and 360° convertible forms for the ultimate in portability and flexibility, plus the added versatility enabled by stylus support in B5 Flip. The new ExpertBook B5 laptops are built for business success in style, with a precision-crafted and minimalist chassis that pushes the limits of lightness. They're also set for stress-free travel with an amazing 11-hour battery life, and are engineered with many cutting-edge technologies to improve on-the-go work efficiency. These include a 12th Gen Intel Core processor with vPro support, AI noise cancelation, dual-SSD RAID support, ASUS NumberPad 2.0 and ASUS ExpertWidget.

The all-new ExpertBook B5 models are also packed with features to protect personal privacy and business data, including a built-in fingerprint sensor and TPM 2.0 chip. ASUS ExpertBook B5 laptops are sleek, stylish and crafted for the ultimate mobility. Both the top and bottom cover are cut from pure aluminium, while the area around the keyboard area is formed using magnesium-aluminium alloy. These premium materials and careful construction keep the weight down to as little as a feather-light 1.1 kg, while also ensuring that the machines are ready for the rigors of everyday use in the office or on the go. ExpertBook B5 laptops are also remarkably thin, with a profile that measures just 16.9 mm, so they're easy to slip into a bag or briefcase, ready to travel anywhere. B5 Flip also offers stylus support.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, is announcing future Total IT Solutions for availability with Android Cloud Gaming and Media Processing & Delivery. These new solutions will incorporate the Intel Data Center GPU, codenamed Arctic Sound-M, and will be supported on several Supermicro servers. Supermicro solutions that will contain the Intel Data Center GPUs codenamed Arctic Sound-M, include the 4U 10x GPU server for transcoding and media delivery, the Supermicro BigTwin system with up to eight Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M in 2U for media processing applications, the Supermicro CloudDC server for edge AI inferencing, and the Supermicro 2U 2-Node server with three Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M per node, optimized for cloud gaming. Additional systems will be made available later this year.

"Supermicro will extend our media processing solutions by incorporating the Intel Data Center GPU," said Charles Liang, President, and CEO, Supermicro. "The new solutions will increase video stream rates and enable lower latency Android cloud gaming. As a result, Android cloud gaming performance and interactivity will increase dramatically with the Supermicro BigTwin systems, while media delivery and transcoding will show dramatic improvements with the new Intel Data Center GPUs. The solutions will expand our market-leading accelerated computing offerings, including everything from Media Processing & Delivery to Collaboration, and HPC."

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, the global leading brand of PC, launches GIGABYTE Gaming G5/G7 gaming laptops equipped with 10nm Intel 12th Gen Processor today. A laptop to meet the wide range of needs in multitasking, gaming, and entertainment, with 12th Gen Intel Core i5-12500H laptop CPU, which is comprised of 12-core, 16 threads, and a maximum clock rate of 4.5GHz, to meet the needs for telecommuting and online classes, the purchase of high-performance laptops has been made easier with the adoption of Core i5-12500H, the Core i5 processor is powerful enough to effortlessly handle users' routines. Equipped with the graphics cards of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series, also introduces MUX switch graphics card switching technology, discrete GPU can be directly output to the display with just one click, which can easily improve the game performance and increase the frame rate in fierce game battles. For offering authentic gaming specifications and flexible expandability of hardware. The series can satisfy the user's needs for playing multiple roles in life.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $51.9 billion and increased 12% (up 16% in constant currency)
• Operating income was $20.5 billion and increased 8% (up 14% in constant currency)
• Net income was $16.7 billion and increased 2% (up 7% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $2.23 and increased 3% (up 8% in constant currency)

"We see real opportunity to help every customer in every industry use digital technology to overcome today's challenges and emerge stronger," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "No company is better positioned than Microsoft to help organizations deliver on their digital imperative - so they can do more with less."

Durabook, the global rugged mobile solutions brand owned by Twinhead International Corporation, today announced significant updates to its R11 fully rugged tablet, achieving a world-first with its 11.6" fully rugged tablet featuring the latest 12th Gen Intel processor and architectural innovations to elevate the user experience.

"Durabook designs devices to meet the demanding needs of field service workers who rely on rugged technology to streamline workflows and improve productivity in even the harshest environments," said Twinhead CEO Fred Kao. "The updated R11 employs the latest technology to meet the ever-changing needs of workforces operating in some of the most demanding sectors, including warehouse, field service, law enforcement, and logistics."

AIC Inc., (from now on referred to as "AIC"), a leading provider in enterprise storage and server solutions, today announced its new product family of mainstream dual socket storage servers. Powered by 3rd Gen. Intel Xeon Scalable processors, these rackmount storage servers are high-performance and designed with high flexibility to support various storage devices. This new product family provides options ranging from cost-efficiency servers to high performance all-flash NVMe platforms and can fulfill wide range of data storage applications from storage tiering, virtualization to cloud datacenters and high performance computing (HPC).

This new product family includes three models, SB101-A6, SB202-A6 and SB201-A6. These dual socket server systems are with AIC server board (codename: A6) that is based on 3rd Gen. Intel Xeon Scalable processors. By leveraging 3rd Gen. Intel Xeon Scalable processors 'great features, including CPU TDP supports up to 270 W, DDR4 memory, PCIe Gen4 ready, built-in AI and enhanced security, the new server systems provide excellent performances and low latency while maintaining the cost-effective benefits. Customers can utilize the enhanced Intel CPU performances, memory capabilities and doubled PCIe Gen4 I/O bandwidth to tackle the challenges in data storage workloads. Besides, the new server systems are designed with universal (tri-mode) backplanes and are able to support SAS, SATA, and NVMe, providing great flexibility for customers to load either 3.5"or 2.5" HDDs/SSDs. With tool-less features, the new server systems can save operators significant amount of maintenance resources, which is crucial for hyper-scaler and cloud environments.

Apple has removed the final remaining Intel components from its latest M2 MacBooks with the Intel JHL8040R USB4 timer chips being replaced with a pair of custom U09PY3 chips. This change was discovered by iFixIt during a recent teardown and documented by Twitter user SkyJuice with the exact reason for the change unknown. This move towards alternative USB4 chips is also present with AMD's latest Rembrandt laptops switching to retimers such as the KB8001 'Matterhorn' from Swiss startup Kandou who claim to supply five of the six largest PC OEMs with such chips.

ASRock has signed up as one of Intel's board partners for its Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards, and is ready with its custom-design Arc A380 Challenger card, pictured below. The company joins the likes of China's Gunnir, in bringing to market some of the first graphics cards from the yet-elusive GPUs from Intel. The ASRock-branded custom A380 card surfaced on Chinese social-media site Bilibili, revealing a cost-effective design, with a simple aluminium mono-block fan-heatsink. The board draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, and like Gunnir's A380 card, has a spartan-looking PCB. There's still no word on global availability, and ASRock could stick to the China-first rollout of Arc.

Intel and MediaTek today announced a strategic partnership to manufacture chips using Intel Foundry Services' (IFS) advanced process technologies. The agreement is designed to help MediaTek build a more balanced, resilient supply chain through the addition of a new foundry partner with significant capacity in the United States and Europe. MediaTek plans to use Intel process technologies to manufacture multiple chips for a range of smart edge devices. IFS offers a broad manufacturing platform with technologies optimized for high performance, low power and always-on connectivity built on a roadmap that spans production-proven three-dimensional FinFET transistors to next-generation breakthroughs.

"As one of the world's leading fabless chip designers powering more than 2 billion devices a year, MediaTek is a terrific partner for IFS as we enter our next phase of growth," said IFS President Randhir Thakur. "We have the right combination of advanced process technology and geographically diverse capacity to help MediaTek deliver the next billion connected devices across a range of applications."

A post on Chinese forum Bilibili has revealed more exact details with regards to when Intel's Raptor Lake series of processors will launch and if nothing changes between now and then, the K and KF SKU's should be announced as previously thought, at the Intel Innovation '22 event that kicks off on the 27th of September. Retail availability, alongside Z790 motherboards should be about a month later, starting the week of the 17th of October. We've confirmed these dates with our own sources, but as always with early information, these things can change.

The rest of the Raptor Lake family of CPUs, as well as the H770 and B760 chipsets are expected to launch at CES 2023 in January and the poster on Bilibili claims that retail sales should be sometime in the second half of January. We've not been able to confirm the latter information here. As per older rumours, Intel is expected to change the PCIe lane allocation for the Z790 chipset compared to Z690 and based on the information posted, Z790 will have 20 PCIe 4.0 and eight PCIe 3.0 lanes, vs. 12 PCIe 4.0 and 16 PCIe 3.0 for the Z690 chipset. Raptor Lake is also said to get native support for faster DDR5 5600 memory, rather than just 4800 MHz DDR5 for Alder Lake. There are apparently no changes to the CPU PCIe lanes and DDR4 support is still here, but once again, no changes have been made to the DDR4 memory controller.

Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids processors will not only be present in the server sector but will also span the high-end desktop (HEDT) platform. Today, according to the findings of a Twitter user, @InstLatX64, we have an appearance of Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids HEDT SKU in Kernel.org boot logs. Named Intel Xeon W9-3495, this model features 56 cores and 112 threads. While there is no specific information about base and boost frequencies, we know that the SKU supports AVX-512 and AMX instructions. This is a welcome addition, as we have seen Intel disable AVX-512 on consumer chips altogether.

With a high core count and additional instructions for Deep Learning, this CPU will power workstations sometimes in the future. With the late arrival of Sapphire Rapids for servers, a HEDT variant should follow.

It's a busy day when it comes to Intel Raptor Lake benchmark leaks and this time around, we're looking at a pair of Core i5-13600K CPUs, but in two different motherboards. The first CPU sits in an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme board and is paired with 32 GB of DDR5 memory, whereas the second CPU is in an ASRock Z690 Steel Legend WiFi 6E board, this one also paired with 32 GB of RAM, but DDR4 rather than DDR5. Both systems are running Windows 10 and unlike the Core i9-13900K results that we saw a couple of weeks ago, these two results are both valid according to the Geekbench results browser.

Courtesy of @harukaze5719 we have a nice graph with the results below, even comparing them to the average Geekbench results for a Core i5-12600K, as well as a Ryzen 9 5950X and a Ryzen 5 5600X. The Core i5-13600K beats everything in the single threaded results and the ASUS system is not far behind the Ryzen 9 5950X in the multithreaded tests. The ASUS system is significantly faster than the ASRock one though, so it seems like Raptor Lake is really making the most out of DDR5 memory. As we don't know the memory clocks, it's hard to say if that is also a contributing factor here, but it's likely that the ASUS system uses much faster memory, as in some of the sub-tests like Rigid Body Physics, the two systems are on par in terms of performance. It'll be interesting to see how Intel prices these upcoming CPUs, especially considering that the company has already warned it'll raise its prices in time for the retail availability of Raptor Lake.

The Chinese technology giant, SMIC, has managed to advance its semiconductor manufacturing technology and shipped the first 7 nm silicon manufactured on China's soil. According to analyst firm TechInsights, who examined the 7 nm Bitcoin mining SoC made for MinerVa firm, there are doubts that SMIC 7 nm process is somewhat similar to TSMC's 7 nm process. Despite having no access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing tools, and US restrictions placed around it, SMIC has managed to produce what resembles an almost perfect 7 nm node. This could lead to a true 7 nm logic and memory bitcells sometimes in the future, as the node advances in SMIC's labs.

Having done an in-depth die analysis, the TechInsights report indicates that TSMC, Intel, and Samsung have a more advanced 7 nm node and are two nodes ahead of the Chinese SMIC. The results are not great regarding the economics and yield of this SMIC 7 nm process. While we have no specific data, the report indicates that the actual working chips made with older DUV tools are not perfect. This is not a problem for the Chinese market as it seeks independence from Western companies and technology. However, introducing a China-made 7 nm chip is more critical as it shows that the country can manufacture advanced nodes with restrictions and sanctions in place. The MinerVa SoC die and the PCB that houses those chips are pictured below.

More details of Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake CPUs have tipped up online, as someone submitted the results of a CPU-Z benchmark to the CPU-Z database. The CPU in question is most likely one of the by now, many ES samples of what should be the Core i9-13900K, which means the multiplier is still limited to 50x, which means the clock speeds can't go beyond 5 GHz. Even so, the extra E-cores helps it best the Core i9-12900K in the multithreaded test over 1400 points, using the average results for all 12900K CPUs in the database. It's also faster than the average Core i9-12900KF in the single-threaded test, but it doesn't quite manage to beat the Core i9-12900K results here.

The test system was admittedly not the very best possible hardware, as an MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 motherboard was used and the CPU was paired with 32 GB of CAS19 DDR4 2666 MHz memory, so there's clearly potential for improvement here. The test system was also using Windows 10, which is potentially another bottleneck when it comes to taking advantage of all the extra E-cores. The E-Cores reached a top speed of 2.99 GHz, with the P-cores peaking at 4.99 GHz. The CPU was hitting 100 degrees C during the test, which suggests that some serious cooling is going to be needed for these CPUs. Intel is likely to reveal its Raptor Lake CPU's during the Intel Innovation '22 event in San Jose, which kicks off on the 27th of September.