Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake processors brought the biggest change in the Core architecture since the range’s launch in 2008, with an ARM-like division into “big” Performance cores (P-cores) and “little” Efficiency cores (E-cores). Alder Lake was a huge success, largely outperforming AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs, only for AMD to retake the lead with the Ryzen 7000 series (see p44).
There’s nothing so revolutionary about this 13th generation of Core chips, codenamed Raptor Lake, yet thanks to a mix of frequency increases, extra cache and improvements to DDR5 throughput, the end result is still dramatic: Intel claims a 15% improvement in single-threaded performance and 41% for multithreaded performance. Claims that our tests largely confirm.
While Intel has released only three unlocked “K” chips so far, the family will extend to 22 desktop chips – not to mention mobile versions. It also marks a different approach to
