Thanks to the early Intel Core i9-13900K retail review of Bilibili, We get an early look at Raptor Lake’s architectural enhancements and performance improvements over Intel’s 12th Generation Alder Lake architecture on the final CPU silicon. Please note that this review is very early and was released well before the official release on October 20th. So take all this information with a grain of salt.
This review states that Intel’s design philosophy introduced in Raptor Lake was to improve both frequency headroom and multithreaded performance by doubling the E-cores and boosting the architecture’s L2 and L3 cache performance. It shows that there was
But starting with the core frequencies first, the Core i9-13900K offers a significant increase in clock speeds over its predecessor, the Core i9-12900K, which featured a 5.8 GHz peak boost on cores 1 and 2, and a You can see the peak turbo boost. 5.5GHz clock. Similarly, the E-cores saw a nice improvement, going from 3.7 GHz on the Core i9-12900K to 4.3 GHz on the Core i9-13900K, despite doubling the core count from 8 to 16 at the same time.
According to reviewers, Intel has also optimized the ring bus to improve access latency between cores. In Intel’s Alder Lake design, the ring bus will drop his 3600 MHz when the E cores are preferentially active over the P cores. But with the Core i9-13900K, the ring bus now works at 4600MHz and above. This small but significant change significantly improves inter-core communication latency to around 30-33 ns for all 24 cores with one exception. Core latency results for Alder Lake show around 30-33 ns for 8 cores and 35-40 ns for the remaining cores.
Raptor Lake Cache Improvements
Overall, the Core i9-13900K shows 5-11% latency improvements in the L1, L2 and L3 caches compared to the P-core Core i9-12900K. In contrast, the E-core shows a significant improvement of 16-18% in the benchmarks tested.
In addition to this, thanks to Raptor Lake’s larger L2 and L3 cache sizes, latency is also improved for longer periods as each test can stay in the L2 or L3 cache longer due to the larger cache size. Raptor Lake achieves this latency improvement in two ways. The first is due to the frequency improvements over Raptor Lake’s cores, and the second is that even if you remove frequency from the equation, cache performance remains roughly the same.
This is a good thing, as larger caches usually have a direct impact on cache latency. However, Raptor Lake does not consider this behavior suitable for performance. The only exception to the latency improvement is for the L3 cache. We know that there is a little extra latency at the edge of the L3 test. However, the E-cores are fair, they are on par and even better when it comes to L3 cache, and they have lower latency compared to Alder Lake.
Bandwidth has also improved significantly, but it depends on your workload. For example, in single-threaded tests on P cores, the L1 cache improves read performance by 12.5%. However, everywhere else the performance is the same between both architectures, including the E core. However, the multi-threaded workload saw a significant improvement in cache bandwidth from 11% to 44%. According to reviewers, this is due to a significant improvement in pure L3 cache bandwidth, as the association has increased from 12-way to 10-way.
raptor lake performance
In Cinebench R15, R20, and R23, the Core i9-13900K achieved an average 12.5% performance improvement over the Core i9-12900KF using only P cores in single-threaded tests. However, in our tests with E-cores, the Core i9-13900K has a 16% improvement in single-threaded performance over the E-cores on the Core i9-12900K, while the other Cinebench versions have the same 12%.
The multi-threaded results showed even better results, with an average performance improvement of 48% for the Raptor Lake portion across all three versions of Cinebench. Additionally, the Core i9-13900K was on average 41% faster than the Core i9-12900KF in all other tests the review ran (7z decompression, compression, encryption, 3DMark, etc.).
The reviewers also tested pure IPC results at the locked 3.6 GHz frequency. For the P cores, the Core i9-13900K has a 12% IPC improvement over the Core i9-12900KF and the E core has a 6% improvement.
Game tests were also conducted on several games including: Ashes of Singularity, CSGO, more. Overall, the Core i9-13900K is over 10% better than the Core i9-12900KF.
If this reviewer’s data is accurate, Raptor Lake is a significant upgrade from Alder Lake in almost every way. It offers generational performance leaps in most areas without migrating to a new Intel node. These improvements can be attributed to L2 and L3 cache density, latency, bandwidth improvements, and added frequency headroom. Not to mention adding twice as many E-cores compared to Alder Lake.
However, it should be stressed that these are very early results for Raptor Lake. These can be very accurate. The release date is October 20th.
