AMD’S NEW DRAGON RANGE has been outclassed a week after its launch by Intel’s i9-13980HX and 13900HX, both destined for power-mad gaming laptops. Both use eight P-cores and 16 E-cores, so we have 32 threads in a laptop for the first time. The 13980HX can buzz along at a maximum boost of 5.6GHz, while the 13900HX is 200MHz behind and has 100MHz slower E-cores. Otherwise, the 55W chips are the same, and even have the same price: $668. These prove to be about 10 to 15 percent faster than AMD’s best. Only the forthcoming 16-core Ryzen 9 7945HX could rival these.
Intel also has two new F-series Raptor Lake chips—a Core i7-13790F ($441) and an i5-13490F ($235), with the ‘F’ denoting the lack of an integrated graphics engine. The i7-13790F follows the pattern of the i7-13700: with eight P-cores, and eight E-cores, running at 4.1GHz and 1.4GHz respectively. The E-cores get a 100MHz bump, plus there’s an extra 3MB of L3 cache. The i5-13490F effectively replaces the i5-12460F and has six P-cores and four E-cores. Clock speeds are 3.5GHz and 1.8GHz respectively. These should be effective gaming chips, but they are initially destined for the Chinese market. Also arriving this month is a range of six low-power ‘T’ series chips with a TDP of 35W, the lowest power consumption Raptor Lake chips available.