Intel 13th Gen 'Raptor Lake' CPU Teased With 24 Cores, 32 Threads

Intel's 13th gen Raptor Lake CPUs have been teased recently, and it looks like the big one is going to be quite the multi-threaded behemoth.

According to VideoCardz, Team Blue demonstrated an early engineering sample of their 13th gen CPU during a recent Investors Meeting event. The aforementioned sample had 24 cores and 32 threads, meaning it uses the same big.LITTLE hybrid architecture featured in the 12th gen Alder Lake chips.

What the configuration means is that the Raptor Lake CPU has a total of 8 P cores and 16 E cores, with the P cores featuring hyperthreading. This is twice the E core count as the top-end i9-12900K.

Twitter user Andreas Schilling posted a video where the Intel Raptor Lake engineering sample was demoed:

In the video, they showcased the chip running a Blender benchmark. As you can see, all 32 threads were being utilized by the test. But that's not even the good part. When the presenter minimized the Blender window to do another task, the chip's workload was automatically redirected to use 16 E cores to process the new task.

What this means is that Team Blue designed Raptor Lake CPUs to spread their workloads on their own by simply putting software in the background. It seems to be that the Intel 13th gen chips are going to be absolute multi-threaded powerhouses, which will make them a perfect choice for content creators.

Multi-threaded workloads have been the domain of AMD Ryzen CPUs over the past few years, so it makes sense that Intel wants to rebuild its reputation there. They've already had a great headstart with Alder Lake, which has been shown as the relatively superior option to Team Red's Ryzen 5000 chips in workstation tasks.

Intel Raptor Lake CPUs are expected to launch in the second half of 2022, right around the same time when AMD's Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 are also rumored to release.

Intel 13th Gen Gaming Performance

What about the gaming performance of Raptor Lake?

Tom's Hardware reported that an Intel 13th gen chip was recently spotted running "Ashes Of The Singularity" with an NVIDIA RTX 3090 graphics card. The benchmark run was done in 1080p to ensure that it is CPU-limited, but the results don't look too promising right now: 13400 points for the 13th gen engineering sample, while an equivalent system with a 12900K scored 13300 points.

Sure, the Raptor Lake chip scored 100 points higher, but that's not much of an improvement considering it features twice as many E cores (eight more threads in total) than a 12900K. In CPU-heavy workloads like "Ashes" where enemy AI is quite advanced, more threads usually should mean a considerable performance boost. But that's not the case here.

But since the leaked benchmark only features an engineering sample and not the retail version of the chip, it should be taken with a grain of salt.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by RJ Pierce