THIS IS IT, then. Intel’s reply to AMD’s 5nm beast, the Ryzen 9 7950X. We give you the new Intel Core i9-13900K, all 24 cores of it. Yes, you read that right. For the new Raptor Lake 13th-generation family of CPUs, the most obvious upgrade is a doubling of efficiency cores from eight to 16. With eight high-performance cores retained, that takes the total core count to 24 and the threads to 32.
That makes for an uneasy comparison between AMD and its 16-core rival. Hold that thought while we consider the rest of the Raptor Lake upgrades. You get more L2 cache per core on those powerful P cores and more shared L2 cache across the low-power E-cores. As for the cores themselves, the P cores get minor tweaks to improve IPC or performance per clock, while the E cores are carried over. There are also optimizations to Raptor Lake’s Compute Fabric, caching policy, memory subsystem, and ring frequency to support the
