Intel Raptor Lake CPUs could be on shelves come October 17

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Intel’s Raptor Lake processors could go on sale on October 17, according to the rumor mill, following a launch in late September.

This fresh speculation on the release timing of Intel’s next-gen CPUs comes from known leaker Enthusiastic Citizen (on Bilibili), as spotted by Tom’s Hardware. You may recall that Enthusiastic Citizen recently provided another Raptor Lake leak concerning the Core i5-13600K (which was an impressive showing for the mid-range chip).

Apply all the usual caveats regarding a suitable degree of skepticism to this (and the previous) leak, of course, but the claim is that Intel will launch Raptor Lake at its Innovation event on September 28 (the dev conference kicks off the day before).

That day will also be when the embargo on reviews is lifted, so would-be buyers should be able to see how the 13th-gen range performs, with the processors going on sale come October 17 as mentioned.

The first models to hit the shelves will apparently be the flagship Core i9-13900K, along with the Core i7-13700K and Core i5-13600K, which would be the expected CPUs to begin with. KF models will also be released – those are processors without integrated graphics for those who are happy to rely on a discrete GPU.

However, non-K CPUs, such as the vanilla Core i7-13700 for example, may not be shown off until CES 2023, on January 5, before going on sale in the latter half of January. Those models aren’t unlocked like K series chips, which means they can’t be overclocked, but that’s fine for many people who won’t ever tinker with their hardware anyway.

Finally, only the top-end Z790 motherboards will launch in October, the leaker claims, and more affordable H760 and B760 chipsets won’t get here until January (where they’ll be pushed out alongside those non-K Raptor Lake processors).

It’s worth remembering that Alder Lake motherboards (600 series) are compatible with Raptor Lake, so you won’t have to upgrade your mobo to a 700 series if you’re already running a 12th-gen chip. And indeed Intel supposedly won’t be releasing an H710 chipset for Raptor Lake, and will instead simply reuse the H610 chipset, which as mentioned is fully compatible.

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Analysis: More of a wait to hit shelves than Alder Lake?

This fresh rumor must be treated with plenty of caution, but it does line up with what we were already thinking. When Intel announced its Innovation event for 2022, the chip giant dropped hints regarding “hearing about the latest launches” at the conference, and last year, this was the platform Team Blue used to unleashed Alder Lake processors.

So we were already believing there was a solid likelihood of seeing Raptor Lake at Innovation, around its long-rumored October launch timeframe, meaning it’s no surprise to hear this from the grapevine. However, what’s particularly interesting to us here is the purported gap between launch and the CPUs actually going on sale.

We were assuming this would be short gap, but that’s just guesswork on our part, based on what happened with Alder Lake – where there was just a week between the reveal and processors hitting the shelves. In this case, Intel will apparently be waiting three weeks before unleashing Raptor Lake so the public can buy it, and that’s a perfectly reasonable prediction.

The chips will only be ready when they’re ready, of course, but we’d been thinking that Intel might want to shoot for an early October launch to try and get the drop on AMD. Team Red’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs are expected to be launched in September and likely to then emerge in October, just the same as the theory holds with Raptor Lake – and whichever company gets their next-gen processors out first will obviously have something of a minor victory in terms of grabbing that limelight the quickest.

In Intel’s case, though, it would be a potentially bigger win because it’d be the third generation of chips to come out without an answer from AMD, which could be regarded as making Team Red look more than a tad sluggish – even if Ryzen 5000 has held its own remarkably well throughout its reign (with that 3D V-cache refresh helping as a kind of stopgap at the top-end for gamers, admittedly).

Maybe AMD will get past the post first, though, if this new rumor is right, but we’ll only know for sure in a couple of months when these next-gen launches should get underway.

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Intel Raptor Lake could be serious trouble for AMD going by this 13600K leak

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Intel’s Raptor Lake is really hitting its stride with leaks, as another one has just emerged – but the latest spilled test results come not from the flagship 13th-gen chip, as many have in recent times, but a mid-range model from the chip giant’s incoming range of next-gen CPUs.

To be precise, what we’re seeing here is some purported benchmarking of the Intel Core i5-13600K, a CPU that’ll be the choice of many buyers as a more affordable option than Core i7 or i9 processors.

The leak was spotted by VideoCardz and is another affair which has been shared via Bilibili in China, this time courtesy of Enthusiastic Citizen. The claim is that the 13600K processor in question is an ES3 or Engineering Sample 3, meaning it’s a later stage pre-release chip.

However, Enthusiastic Citizen asserts that the ES3 CPU is being run at the same clocks as a QS or Qualification Sample – in other words, the pre-release models which are essentially the finished version, sent out to Intel’s partners for testing – so it should give us a good idea of final performance (arm yourself with a very distinct sense of skepticism when considering all this, of course).

What this means is that the engineering sample did run at 4.9GHz to 5.1GHz boost on its performance cores, but Enthusiastic Citizen jacked that up to hit 5.1GHz across all-cores to simulate the final chip (efficiency cores were also boosted from 3.9GHz to 4GHz, too).

In case you’d forgotten, the Core i5-13600K is thought to have six performance cores and eight efficiency ones, meaning it’s a 14-core chip in total (with 20-threads, as only the performance cores have hyper-threading).

The benchmarking was carried out in CPU-Z and Cinebench, and in the former, the 13600K hit 830 points for single-core and 10,031 points in multi-core, which is respectively 8% and 79% faster than its predecessor, the current 12600K.

As for Cinebench R23, we see the 13600K attain 1,387 points in single-core, and 24,420 for multi-core. That’s a blistering 40% quicker for multi-core compared to the 12600K, but the single-core result has gone badly awry here, as it’s actually 26% slower for the Raptor Lake chip.

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Analysis: A lot of caveats, but nonetheless looking promising for Intel

Clearly something weird is going on with that first Cinebench result, as a next-gen CPU being 26% slower than the chip it’s replacing is obviously not right. This is a reminder that benchmarking pre-release silicon – especially in a scenario where an engineering chip has been boosted to match the purported frequency of a qualification sample – is a veritable minefield of caveats.

Still, the other results provided here do fall about where we’d expect. Seeing a 40% boost in multi-core is very impressive, and it exactly matches another leak where the Core i9-13900K flagship also achieved this same 40% generational leap – so that adds a bit more weight to the evidence presented here.

It’s a good sign to see such predicted performance gains for a mid-range Raptor Lake CPU, and we can certainly expect better multi-core performance from 13th-gen chips given that Intel is purportedly really ramping up the overall core count by doubling up on efficiency cores in the 13600K (and 13900K).

However, these early leaks are also pointing to power usage being bumped up with Raptor Lake, and Enthusiastic Citizen theorizes that the 13600K could run with a 160W TDP (not a world of difference to the 150W of the 12600K, but a bit of a step up nonetheless).

One of the most exciting things to see right now is the sudden increase in leakage around Raptor Lake sample CPUs, which is what’s commonly witnessed in the run up to the launch of a new generation of silicon. Intel’s 13th-gen chips are rumored to be arriving early in October – theoretically following a late September launch event – and the steady flow of Raptor Lake spillage coming right now suggests that this will indeed be the case.

The main question is then whether AMD will manage to beat Intel to the punch with the release of Ryzen 7000 before then – right now, the rumor mill seems to believe that both next-gen CPU ranges are set to debut at around the same time, in September. AMD could have quite a fight on its hands in the mid-range territory if this leak proves to be on the money, so Team Red can’t really afford to be late with Zen 4.

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