After weeks of teasers and leaks, Intel is lastly making its thirteenth Gen processors official at present. Intel’s thirteenth Gen desktop CPUs will begin arriving on October twentieth, led by the flagship Core i9-13900K priced at $589. That’s the identical worth as Intel’s earlier 12900K flagship, regardless of Intel’s warning of worth will increase. Intel’s thirteenth Gen announcement comes simply as AMD launches its new Ryzen 7000 processors at present in a battle for desktop dominance.

Intel’s Core i9-13900K will ship with 24 cores, 32 threads, and clock speeds of as much as 5.8GHz. Built on Intel’s 7 course of and its x86 efficiency hybrid structure, thirteenth Gen processors embrace Performance cores (P-cores) and Efficient cores (E-cores) that cut up workloads intelligently utilizing Intel’s Thread Director, an embedded microcontroller contained in the CPU that screens threads and ensures they’re working on the right cores.

Intel used this similar structure for its twelfth Gen chips final yr, and it’s an analogous strategy to what Apple has been doing with its Arm-based silicon. Instead of cramming new chips filled with power-hungry cores, this P-core / E-core cut up needs to be extra environment friendly. Having mentioned that, these thirteenth Gen chips now eat extra energy in max turbo than their Alder Lake predecessors.

Intel’s thirteenth Gen of processors will embrace 22 in whole, led by at present’s Core “K” processors for the very excessive finish of shopper PCs. Intel is promising as much as 15 p.c higher single-thread efficiency on its Core i9-13900K and as much as 41 p.c higher multithreaded efficiency.

While Intel hasn’t bumped the variety of P-cores obtainable on its thirteenth Gen processors, the Core i5, i7, and i9 chips all have extra E-cores, which ought to assist in multitasking and multithreaded apps. That works out to eight extra E-cores on the Core i9 and 4 extra on the Core i7 and Core i5 chips.

The base frequencies for each kinds of cores have dropped throughout the Core i5, i7, and i9 chips. Instead, increase frequencies are up, which may take the Core i9 all the best way to five.8GHz. That’s 600MHz greater than the 12900K, and on the most recent Core i7, it’s 400MHz extra, with the Core i5 at 200MHz extra. Intel additionally teased a 6GHz-capable chip, however the firm isn’t asserting that at present.

There’s additionally PCIe Gen 5.0 assist with as much as 16 lanes off the processor and DDR5-5600 and DDR5-5200 assist. Intel can also be sustaining DDR4 compatibility for motherboard makers that need to proceed delivery with DDR4 as an alternative of DDR5. L3 and L2 cache have each been elevated, too.

The actual story right here is worth and energy draw. Prices on the Core i9 and Core i7 processors are surprisingly the identical as final yr, regardless of Intel warning of worth will increase to its flagship chips earlier this yr. The Core i5 is the one processor getting a worth bump, with the Core i5-13600K transferring to $319, up from the $289 pricing of the Core i5-12600K. Similarly, the Core i5-13600KF (with out built-in graphics) is priced at $294, up from the $264 of final yr’s mannequin. It stays to be seen whether or not we truly see these prompt costs from retailers, although.

While worth will increase have solely affected the Core i5 this yr, energy necessities are up throughout. All Core i5, i7, and i9 chips have a base energy of 125 watts, however the Core i7 and Core i9 will each want 253 watts for his or her max turbo energy. That’s a 5 p.c bounce from the 241 watts on the Core i9 final yr, but it surely’s a large 33 p.c bounce for the Core i7, which strikes from 190 watts final yr to 253 watts for the thirteenth Gen. Intel’s Core i5-13600K now wants 181 watts for max turbo, up 20 p.c from the 150 watts on the Alder Lake model.

The Core i7 and Core i5 energy necessities are stunning, particularly as many decide these chips for gaming once they don’t want the uncooked energy the Core i9 provides.

Intel’s thirteenth Gen processors additionally launch alongside new 700-series chipsets. Existing 600-series motherboards will assist these new thirteenth Gen (Raptor Lake) chips, however the brand new Z790 motherboards will provide eight further PCIe 4.0 lanes, elevated USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (20Gbps) ports, and DMI Gen 4.0 for improved throughput entry to peripherals and networking.

The actual query will likely be how nicely the 13900K performs in opposition to AMD’s newest Ryzen 7950X and 7900X chips. Intel hasn’t made these direct comparisons but, but it surely has supplied up a handful of benchmarks that present the 13900K each beating and shedding to AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D. We’ll want to check the 13900K to learn how it actually performs in gaming and past.

Intel’s thirteenth Gen desktop processors will begin delivery on October twentieth, alongside Z790 motherboards. Intel says it can share extra particulars on the remainder of the thirteenth Gen processor household “at a later date.”