Raptor Lake puts Intel back in the game and is proof Gelsinger’s plan is no idle boast.
INTEL’S 13TH-GENERATION Raptor Lake processors are impressive beasts. After struggling against AMD’s Zen-based Ryzen chips in the past few years, the blue team now has a winner. We have solid proof of how robust the flagship i9-13900K model is, thanks to a world overclocking record of 8.81285GHz, achieved with the help of liquid nitrogen cooling, a core voltage of 1.325V, a multiplier of 88, and a tweaked bus of 100.15MHz.
Raptor Lake was always going to be a contender—before it was released, engineering samples were reported to reach 8GHz. The eight-year-old record was held by AMD’s FX-8370, a 32nm eightcore chip based around the Piledriver architecture, which managed 8.72278GHz. So, Intel took the record with an improvement of 90MHz, just one percent.
Meanwhile, there are rumors of a refresh for Raptor Lake in the second half of 2023, with an announcement expected at CES in Las Vegas in January. Up to 16 new versions could arrive, along with the B790 motherboard chipset. There’s no hint of the Core i9-13900KS yet, though Intel has confirmed its existence, with a clock speed of 6GHz out of the box.