As AMD’s best gaming CPU, Intel has already taken the crown with its Alder Lake chips, but it plans to extend its lead even further with its Raptor Lake processors. AMD’s Zen 4 components are scheduled for release later this year, but team blue is betting on its hybrid core design to gain the upper hand.
Raptor Lake chips will feature up to 24 cores (eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores) and 32 threads, so we should be able to play the best PC games without any issues.Given that Raptor Lake chips will feature up to 24 cores (eight performance and 16 efficiency) and 32 threads, we can expect them to play the best PC games without much of an issue. Due to Intel Thread Director technology, they should also work well with Windows 11.
Intel plans to enter the graphics card market with its Arc Alchemist GPUs prior to the launch of its 13th generation Core processors, meaning we might see gaming PCs built entirely with team blue components. The upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 and AMD RDNA 3 graphics cards could undermine Intel’s plans to dominate the entire PC market.
Here’s everything we know about Intel Raptor Lake CPUs:
INTEL RAPTOR LAKE RELEASE DATE
Intel confirmed that Raptor Lake will be released in the second half of 2022 during its Investors Meeting 2022 event. It could be that previous rumours suggesting a Q4 launch are accurate, but the company may move this up to Q3 to compete with Ryzen 7000 CPUs.
INTEL RAPTOR LAKE PRICE
Intel is unlikely to reveal the price of its Raptor Lake CPUs until we are closer to launch. Nevertheless, we can make some educated guesses based on the pricing of its Alder Lake lineup.
Intel’s current flagship chip, the Core i9-12900K, has an MSRP of $589 USD, so the 13900K will likely cost similar or a bit more. We hope that the release of AMD’s Zen 4 based Ryzen CPUs will force the company’s to price its processors more competitively, but we’ll have to wait and see.
INTEL RAPTOR LAKE SPECS
CPUs for Raptor Lake will be produced on the same Intel 7 process node used for Alder Lake. It will also use the same LGA 1700 socket as 12th Gen Core components, meaning that 13th Gen Intel Core chips should be somewhat backwards compatible with existing motherboards.
During its Investors Meeting 2022 event, Intel revealed that 13th Gen Core processors will feature up to 24 cores (eight performance and 16 efficiency) and 32 threads. This is the company’s second generation of hybrid CPUs, marking the most cores to ever appear on a Core chip.
INTEL RAPTOR LAKE BENCHMARKS
Intel showcased a Raptor Lake CPU utilising its Thread Director technology at its Investors Meeting 2022 event to run an Adobe After Effects and Blender workload simultaneously.
During the same livestream, Intel also claimed that we can expect a “double digit performance boost”, or 10%+, from Raptor Lake compared to Alder Lake.