Core i5-13600K Flexes Multi-Core Muscle in Geekbench, Nearly Matches Ryzen 5950X

Intel’s upcoming Core i5 Raptor Lake processors are shaping up to be serious multi-threaded monsters against the best CPUs, according to new Geekbench 5 benchmarks shared on Twitter. Resident leaker @harukaze5719 shared two new Core i5-13600K benchmarks today, which showcases the new chip dominating its predecessor, the 12600K, and coming close to matching the score of AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X flagship.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen, a few days ago we reported on an engineering sample 13600K nearly matching the 5950X in CInebench R23 and in CPU-Z. So with both benchmarks backing each other up, these performance numbers could be legitimate estimations of the 13600K’s real-world synthetic performance, assuming clock speeds don’t change.

Harukaze shared two 13600K benchmarks, one running the chip on an Asus ROG Maximum Z690 Extreme and another with the ASRock Z690 Steel Legend WiFi. The Z690 Extreme scored the highest of the two with a single-threaded Geekbench 5 result of 2,012 points and a multi-threaded score of 16,054.

The ASRock results underperform by a little bit in the single-threaded results with a score of 1,980, but the performance disparity increases a lot more in the multi-threaded benchmark results with a score of 14,425 — an 11% reduction compared to the Z690 Extreme. We aren’t sure what exactly is going on here, but it's safe to assume the Z690 Extreme is automatically tuning the 13600K’s power limits higher or it is increasing the duration of the turbo boost limit (if there are any) since it is - after all, Asus’ flagship motherboard designed for overclocking. ASRock's Z690 Steel Legend on the other hand, is more of an entry-level/mid-range platform instead.

Nonetheless, these results are seriously impressive for a mid-range processor and a massive jump up from Intel’s current mid-range king, the Core i5-12600K. If we take the best performing 13600K results and compare them to Harukaze's 12600K results, the 13600K is a whopping 38% faster in the multi-threaded score, and a respectable 8% faster in the single-threaded area.

This massive multi-core jump can be attributed to Intel’s new Raptor Lake microarchitecture, featuring an updated combination of P cores and E cores. This new combo will give 13th gen chips twice the amount of efficiency cores compared to Alder Lake. Giving the 13600K access to eight efficiency cores, for a grand total of 14 cores and 20 threads (E cores don’t have hyperthreading). The 12600K has just four E-cores for a total of ten cores in all.

Four small cores don’t sound like a lot of extra power but combined with Raptor Lake’s faster "Raptor Cove: cores, the multi-threaded gains are impressive, to say the least. The performance improvements on the 13600K are also enough to close the gap on AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 high-performance Zen 3 cores, with a Geekbench 5 result just 3% behind the AMD part.

But there is also a chance the 13600K could be even faster if the clock speeds aren’t finalized. Current rumors speculate that the flagship Raptor Lake parts will feature clock speeds upwards of 5.6 or 5.7 GHz, which would be the highest official clocks ever on a consumer processor. The 13600K clock speeds shown in these Geekbench 5 results peaked at just 5.1GHz, so there is definitely a chance Intel will increase clock speeds for the retail product.