Raptor Lake is Intel’s range of next-gen processors expected to come out in 2022, and we’ve just seen the first purported benchmark of these CPUs.
As highlighted by regular hardware leaker Komachi_Ensaka on Twitter, what could be the 13th-gen flagship processor has been sighted in a BAPCo Crossmark benchmark as Tom’s Hardware reports.
Note that the benchmark has since been removed – of course, it shouldn’t have been aired in the first place – but not before Tom’s screen grabbed and shared the news.
According to the details given here, the spec that the chip runs with is eight performance cores (new Raptor Cove cores), and 16 efficiency cores (Gracemont cores – the same as with Alder Lake). This is what was previously rumored, and gives the processor a theoretical 32-threads (as efficiency cores don’t have hyper-threading).
The benchmark itself shows the Raptor Lake CPU hitting an overall score of 1,591, which compares to a result of 2,376 for the Core i9-12900K, Intel’s new Alder Lake flagship.
Analysis: Don’t read much into an early engineering sample
It’s no surprise – assuming this benchmark is genuine, which is always a bit of a leap of faith with very early leaks – to see that Raptor Lake is a good deal slower than Alder Lake at this point in its development (the 12900K is almost 50% faster here, in fact). Obviously, when the Raptor Lake flagship is finished, that won’t be the case (if it wasn’t measurably faster, Intel would go back to the drawing board until it was).
What’s happening here is because this is a very early testing sample, it’s doubtless locked to slow clock speeds and doesn’t remotely reflect the performance of the final product which should emerge later in 2022 (maybe in Q3). Right now, Raptor Lake will still have plenty of optimization to be done on both the hardware and software fronts.
The theory is that Intel’s 13th-gen CPUs will be a simple refresh of Alder Lake, but it’s bound to make some decent architectural gains as Intel refines its new hybrid tech, and obviously the addition of more efficiency cores – a lot more if these early rumors are right – should make a considerable difference to performance too.
There is also speculation about Raptor Lake taking some big strides forward in terms of power-efficiency as well, so we can still remain quietly optimistic about what the next-gen might bring.
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