At least one of Intel’s upcoming 13th-generation CPUs will be able to drive at 6GHz at stock. The attribute was communicated in a slide onstage at Intel’s Technology Tour 2022, which also expresses it’ll be capable of hitting 8GHz when overclocked, weeks after AMD promised 5.7GHz for its next flagship.
In addition, Raptor Lake promises other improvements for this new generation, including a 15 percent improvement in the single-threaded version and a 41 percent improvement in multi-threaded performance.
Intel’s 6GHz claim is a shot across the bow at competitor AMD, which recently said that its upcoming flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X will be capable of boosting up to 5.7GHz. Although raw clock speeds aren’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to performance, breaking the 6GHz barrier would be an essential marketing win for Intel, which has recently been battling a resurgent AMD in the CPU market for years.
The Raptor Lake CPU lineup is yet to be officially revealed, so it’s ambiguous which or how many of the generation’s processors will be competent to hit these clock speeds. However, given Intel’s 12900KS upgraded up to 5.5GHz (up 300MHz from the maximum 5.2GHz speed on the regular i9-12900K), Intel’s 6GHz CPU may well be a KS-branded version of its upcoming 13900K chip.
Official pricing and release date information has not yet been made public, but Intel is set to reveal more details at its Innovation event in San Jose, California, on September 27. In what is unlikely to be a co-occurrence, that’s the same day AMD releases its Ryzen 7000 processors.
Raptor Lake is Intel’s codename for the upcoming 13th-generation Intel Core processors based on a hybrid architecture, utilizing Gracemont power-efficient cores. Raptor Lake is expected to launch in the fall of 2022 with mobile parts at the end of the year. Like Alder Lake, Raptor Lake will be fabricated using Intel’s Intel 7.
At Intel Investor Meeting 2022, it was confirmed that Raptor Lake would feature up to 24 cores (8 performance + 16 efficiencies) and 32 threads and socket compatibility with Alder Lake systems (LGA 1700). The company spokesman revealed that Raptor Lake is a stopgap solution before Meteor Lake Arrives since the next microarchitecture wasn’t ready on time.
Gracemont, a microarchitecture for low-power processors, is used in designs on a chip (SoCs) created by Intel and is the successor to Tremont. Like its predecessor, it is also executed as low-power cores in a hybrid configuration of the Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors.
Likewise, Bulldozer existed as AMD’s microarchitecture codename for server and desktop AMD FX processors, first released on October 12, 2011. This family 15h microarchitecture is the inheritor of the family 10h (K10) microarchitecture design. Bulldozer was a clean-sheet design, not a consequence of earlier processors. The core explicitly strived at 10–125 W TDP computing products.
AMD asserted dramatic performance-per-watt efficiency advancements in high-performance computing (HPC) applications with Bulldozer nuclei. While hopes were high that Bulldozer would make AMD’s performance competitive with Intel again, most standards were disappointing. In some matters, the new Bulldozer products were more gradual than the K10 models they were constructed to replace.