The Core i9-13900K sounds like a beast.
Examine the competition between Intel and AMD to produce the fastest PC CPU to understand the power of competition. Over the past ten years, Intel has struggled with production delays and design flaws. Still, AMD has invested more in its Zen architecture to produce an impressive family of Ryzen chips that are perfect for performance-hungry enthusiasts. Some of our favorite gaming laptops today, like the ASUS Zephyrus G14, are powered by AMD chips.
But just as we were about to give up on Intel, the 12th-generation Core CPUs marked the company’s successful delivery of its long-awaited hybrid chips. While using less power than the previous 11th-gen chips, a combination of performance cores (P-cores) and efficient cores (E-cores) defeated AMD in most multi-threaded benchmarks.
The successor is Raptor Lake or Intel’s 13th generation of Core chips. And it certainly appears that Intel isn’t slacking off. The Core i9-13900K, the company’s latest top-of-the-line processor, has 24 (8 P-cores and 16 E-cores) and can run at a maximum frequency of 5.8GHz. In contrast, the 12900K from the previous year had 16 cores (8P and 8E) and a top speed of 5.2 GHz. The new 13900K, according to Intel, performs single-threaded tasks 15% faster than its predecessor and multi-threaded tasks like video encoding or 3D rendering 41% better.
The Intel 7 process, which includes the third-generation SuperFin transistor from the company, is the foundation for the 13th-generation chips. It sounded like a way for Intel to squeeze out more performance from its 10nm designs as it struggled to hit 7nm when that 3D transistor technology was first announced in 2020. (Despite being rebranded as the Intel 7 process last year, it is still 10nm.) That appears to have been the case in the majority of cases. While Intel demonstrated with its 12th-gen chips that it could still outpace AMD with a larger fabrication process, AMD reached 6nm with its Ryzen 6000 and 7000 chips this year.
According to the preliminary specifications, the 13th-gen chips appear to be a significant upgrade. Compared to its predecessor, the Core i5-13600K adds four cores and an initial 200 Mhz of Turbo speed, reaching 14 and up to 5.1 GHz. The i7-13700K now has up to 16 cores and 5.4GHz, whereas the comparable i7 from the previous year had 12 cores.
What is the main lesson here? The 13th-gen CPUs appear to be the upgrade you’ve been waiting for if you skipped last year’s chips and used older Intel hardware. Using programs like Adobe Media Encoder and Photoshop, Intel claims that the 13900K is 27 percent faster than the 12900K when it comes to multitasking for content creation. Additionally, it’s reportedly 34% faster for media creation apps like Blender and Unreal Engine.
Intel asserts that the 13900K is 58 percent faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X in Spider-Man: Remastered, even though it hasn’t yet been possible to compare it to AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 7000 chips (which aren’t yet available). However, given that the AMD chip is almost two years old, that is to be expected.
Although we intend to test as much of the hardware as possible, it is difficult to predict how this most recent conflict between Intel and AMD will turn out. But if anything, now is undoubtedly a thrilling time to look for a new CPU.
