Intel’s 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors are looking more and more like a refresh of Alder Lake with fatter caches. As already reported earlier via the chipmaker’s top-down microarchitectural analysis (TMA), the Raptor Cove “P” core is identical to Golden Cove. This is similar to the Coffee Lake and Comet Lake comparison. The larger L2 cache is said to be the only change with the L3 cache scaled up to account for the increased Gracemont “E” core count.
The Gracemont cores have been doubled across the board, topping out at 16 on the Core i9-13900K for a total of 24. As per the mapfile of the Intel perfmon tool, the uncore components which consist of the memory controller, PCI bus, and the Thunderbolt controller have also been retained. This indicates that the PCI bus speeds, memory profile, and other I/O options ought to be more or less identical to Alder Lake.
According to Intel’s official slides, Raptor Lake will feature enhanced overclocking abilities and an AI M.2 module but that’s about it. There have been rumors of faster DDR5 memory support (alongside DDR4) but as of now, that’s all they are.
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