Intel Reveals Plans To Release A Stock Clocked 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPU Running At 6GHz
On stage during Intel's Technology Tour 2022 in Israel, an executive teased that there will be a 13th Gen Core ‘Raptor Lake’ processor that is capable of running at 6GHz with stock settings. Moreover, the same SKU has been confirmed by Intel as being successfully overclocked to 8GHz using extreme cooling.
Releasing a processor with a stock clock of 6GHz will be a milestone for Intel, and the industry as a whole. AMD’s best upcoming Ryzen 7000 processor will be a full 300MHz slower. However, we don’t know what Intel product will be launched with these clock speeds. It might be a top-end niche enthusiast chip like a painstakingly sorted ‘KS’ product, which could come months in the wake of the first designs releasing.
Whichever Raptor Lake you might get your hands on, there are gains to be had, even at iso-clock speeds. Intel claims that the new 13th Gen CPUs will offer a generation-to-generation performance increase of 15% for single-threaded workloads, and 41% for multi-threaded workloads. Those figures come from SPECintrate_2017 testing.
The above image came via HardwareLuxx’s editor Andreas Schilling’s Tweet about the headlining 6GHz stock clocks. Dr Ian Cutress confirmed another interesting fact from the Israel leg of the Intel Tech Tour. According to the ex-Anandtech CPU editor, Raptor Lake was only created because Intel management knew that Meteor Lake wasn’t going to be ready in time. For a ‘filler’ product, we reckon Intel has done a good job with Raptor Lake, and the stats mentioned in the news above back this up (see clock speed milestones and performance over Alder Lake).
The story goes that Intel became aware that it was going to need Raptor Lake two years ago. This is partly the reason why the 13th Gen Core iGPU and I/O die aren’t changed from 12th Gen. Admittedly, Meteor Lake is a very significant step to make, bringing in a multitude of advances like the Intel 4 manufacturing process, new tiled architecture, the tGPU made by TSMC, and built-in AI acceleration integration.
