Igor from Igor’s Lab has managed to get his hands on the official Intel slide deck for the 13th Gen Core Raptor Lake processors. The leaked data includes the SKU specifications, architectural upgrades as well as some of the finer platform and I/O improvements. Let’s start with the primary components vis-à-vis the cores. As reported several times, Raptor Lake is essentially an Alder Lake refresh with a fine-tuned cache sub-system, increased efficiency “Gracemont” cores, and raised clocks.
Igor’s slides confirm this and then some. In addition to increasing the core count to 24 (8P + 16E), the L3 cache has also been scaled up to feed them. The L2 cache has also been doubled to 2MB per Raptor Cove (P) core for increased core bandwidth. However, the lower level per core cache has only been upgraded on the higher-end SKUs. The Core i5-13600 and lower will still feature 1MB of L2 cache per core, leading to fewer resources per thread. (https://iheartrving.com/) In conclusion, the budget Raptor Lake offerings will be identical to their Alder Lake predecessors, ignoring the E-core bump.
Coming to the 700 series chipset, the PCIe Express 4.0 lane count has been pushed up to 20 (from 12), replacing older Gen 3 lanes. Gen 5 support is still missing from the chipset and will be extended from the process instead.
Coming to the memory, the out-of-the-box memory support has been scaled up to DDR5-5600 (from 4800) while keeping the remaining I/O capabilities intact.
As is the norm with new launches, Intel will be releasing the 13th Gen processors starting with the high-end “unlocked” K series parts, delaying the non-K offerings to early 2023.
Source: Igor’s Lab
