The first benchmarks of Intel’s 13th Gen Core i5-13600K (Engineering Sample, mind you) have surfaced, potentially spelling trouble for the budget Ryzen 7000 offerings. The midrange Raptor Lake chip features a total of 14 cores and 20 threads: 6 Raptor Cove + 8 Gracemont alongside 24MB of L3 cache. Despite being an early engineering sample, it manages to beat the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X while also coming quite close to the 16 core Ryzen 9 5950X:
Source: ECSM Official (Bilibili).
In the CPU-Z benchmark, the Core i5-13600K is 28% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X in the single-threaded metric while pretty much leveling with it in the multi-core test despite featuring fewer cores, not to mention just 6 P-cores.
In Cinebench R23, the Core i5-13600K seems to be running at low speeds resulting in mediocre single-threaded performance, something that should be fixed with the qualification samples. In the multi-core benchmark, it’s an amazing 37% faster than the Core i5-12600K while also beating the Ryzen 9 5900X by about 10%.
The Core i5-13600K manages to one-up the Ryzen 7 5800X by a whole 6,xxx points, coming really close to the Ryzen 9 5950X as well. The final retail version should perform similar to the latter, making it an incredible VoM CPU. I can already picture the 13600K leading the bestselling charts across most major markets.
