Raptor Lake vs. Alder Lake – many benchmarks with a sample of a “Core i9-13900”

The Expreview website apparently got a pre-production Intel Raptor Lake with 24 cores and 32 threads and pitted it against Intel Alder Lake at the same time. However, the results do not provide a conclusive picture.

The Raptor Lake CPU is classified as a sample of a “Core i9-13900”; however, the 3.8 GHz clock rate for all eight performance cores (P cores) is significantly lower than expected for the finished product. In addition, the efficiency cores (E-Cores) have been doubled compared to Alder Lake to 16, as well as the well-known plus in the L2 cache.

According to the low clock, the sample is given a TDP of 65 watts using the CPU-Z tool. The Intel Core i9-12900K used for the direct performance comparison, on the other hand, has a TDP of 125 watts and runs typically up to 5.1 GHz. However, to make the comparison fair, the clock of the Alder Lake processor is limited to 3.8 GHz for the Raptor Lake sample.

Raptor Lake Landmarks

In the numerous tests with applications such as Sandra 2021, 7-zip, Cinebench or Blender, at least when using several threads, a significant performance increase is seen, which is usually around 20 or 30 percent in favor of the newcomer equipped with more cores. . The result, which is more than double (+106%) in the Sandra reference suite’s multi-FP64 test, is clearly off the mark. There was only 13 percent more performance in the x265 benchmark.

However, single-threaded benchmarks surprisingly show lower performance at the same clock. Raptor Lake falls behind by 8 percent in the 3DMark CPU test and by as much as 11 percent in Cinebench R23. However, the confusion is due to the fact that the colors of the two CPUs are sometimes swapped in the diagrams. This also applies to those of VideoCardz Y WCCFtech the generated overviews can lead to errors; at least in the SuperPi benchmark there should be a plus instead of a minus.

However, on average for all these application benchmarks, the increase in performance is around 20 percent in favor of the Raptor Lake engineering sample. The makers of the SiSoft Sandra analysis tool had previously published benchmarks for a comparable Raptor Lake sample, which saw the chip run 33 to 50 percent faster than Alder Lake in synthetic ALU and FPU tests.

Raptor Lake in games

On the other hand, Expreview’s gaming benchmarks seem modest for the sample, similar to single thread benchmarks. Most of the time there is a tie with Alder Lake, but sometimes the newcomer is a few percentage points behind its predecessor.

Given that you can expect at least the same performance as Alder Lake with the same clock, or it should be slightly higher due to larger caches, the measurements are surprising.

Results with caution, high clock is expected

In the case of pre-series hardware with a BIOS that may not yet have been tuned perfectly, the results should be treated with caution anyway.

Ultimately, it also depends on the clock rates of the final CPU models. Expect more clock increases here compared to Alder Lake. The rumor mill recently even speculated about a turbo clock. up to 6GHzbut there is no hard evidence for this.