The Raptor Lake CPU is classified as a sample of a “Core i9-13900”; however, the clock rate of 3.8 GHz for the eight performance cores (P cores) is significantly lower than expected for the finished product. In addition, there are doubled the efficiency cores (E-Cores) compared to Alder Lake to 16 as well as the well-known plus in the L2 cache.
CPU-Z screenshot of Raptor Lake ES and Alder Lake (Image: Expreview)
In keeping with the low clock, the sample is given a TDP of 65 watts using the CPU-Z tool. The Intel Core i9-12900K used for the direct performance comparison, on the other hand, has a TDP of 125 watts and works normally at up to 5.1 GHz. However, to make the comparison fair, the clock of the Alder Lake processor was limited to the 3.8 GHz of the Raptor Lake sample.
Raptor Lake benchmarks
In the numerous tests with applications such as Sandra 2021, 7-zip, Cinebench or Blender, at least when using several threads, there is a significant increase in performance of usually around 20 or 30 percent in favor of the newcomer equipped with more cores. The result, which is more than twice as high (+106%) in the multi-FP64 test of the Sandra benchmark suite, is clearly out of line. There was only 13 percent more performance in the x265 benchmark.
App benchmarks of Raptor Lake ES vs. Alder Lake (both at 3.8 GHz) (Image: Expreview)
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On average, however, for all of these app benchmarks, the increase in performance is around 20 percent in favor of the engineering sample from Raptor Lake. The makers of the SiSoft Sandra analysis tool had previously published benchmarks for a comparable Raptor Lake sample, which saw the chip perform 33 to 50 percent faster than Alder Lake in synthetic ALU and FPU tests.
Raptor Lake in games
On the other hand, the Expreview gaming benchmarks look modest for the sample, similar to the single-thread benchmarks. Most of the time there is a tie with Alder Lake, but sometimes the newcomer is a few percentage points behind its predecessor.
Game benchmarks of Raptor Lake ES vs. Alder Lake (both at 3.8 GHz) (Image: WCCFTech)
Since at least the same performance as Alder Lake can be expected with the same clock, or it should be a bit higher due to the larger caches, the measurements are surprising.
Results with caution, high clock expected
In the case of pre-series hardware with a BIOS that may not yet have been perfectly tuned, the results should be treated with caution anyway.
Ultimately, it also depends on the clock frequencies of the final CPU models. Further clock increases compared to Alder Lake are expected here. The rumor mill recently even speculated about a turbo clock of up to 6 GHz, but there is no solid proof of this.
