Core i7-13700K Allegedly up to 60% Faster Than Alder Lake With DDR5

According to a tweet by @9550pro, engineering samples of Intel’s upcoming Raptor Lake i7-13700K and i5-13600K were tested in a plethora of benchmarking applications from a Chinese content creator on bilibili.com. The applications show serious performance gains for the newer Raptor Lake parts, with as much as a 40% to 60% difference in CPU horsepower compared to their Alder Lake predecessors.

According to the bilibili video, tests included a Core i7-13700K with 8P cores and 8E cores clocked at up to 5.3GHz with a combination of DDR4-3600 and DDR5-5200. These results were directly compared against the Core i7-12700K operating with the same memory kits. 

For the core i5-13600K results, specs show this chip featuring 6P cores and 8E cores with a frequency of up to 5.1GHz operating on the same DDR4 and DDR5 frequencies as the 13700K. Testing was compared against its predecessor, the 12600K, with the same memory kits.

 According to the benchmark results listed above, it appears the 13700K has roughly a 10% performance uplift in single-threaded workloads, this is most notable in CPU-Z, and Cinebench R20. But the multi-threaded results share a different story. With anywhere between 120-140% better performance on the 13700K vs the 12700KF.

The 7-Zip results are particularly interesting, with the 13700K absolutely dominating the compression results with a whopping 164.84% improvement over its predecessor in the DDR5 tests, compared to the Alder Lake DDR5 average of 140.51% - compared to the baseline DDR4 results. This shows us that Raptor Lake can take better advantage of DDR5’s capabilities in memory-intensive applications compared to Alder Lake.

The i5-13600k results are similar to the 13700K but with a bit more bias towards the multi-threaded performance of the chip. In these results, the single-threaded performance is slightly worst, with a 105 - 108% average. However, its multi-threaded performance over its predecessor is better than the 13700K, with a near 140% average across most of the benchmark results.

This is probably related to the closer frequency delta between the 13600K and the 12600K. In addition, the 13600K E core count is much more impactful compared to the 13700K since both feature the exact same core count jump compared to their Alder Lake predecessors, but the 13600K has fewer P cores to work with.

Core Clocks Are Suspiciously Low For Raptor Lake Parts, Dose of Salt is Advised

Overall, take these results with a hefty dose of salt. On the surface, these benchmarks appear to tell us that Raptor Lake will be a more multi-threaded focused architecture with meager single-threaded performance gains.

But, we’ve heard reports to the contrary, where Raptor Lake will largely focus on single-threaded performance as well as multi-threaded performance. Raptor Lake is believed to have the highest core frequencies we’ve seen out of any processor to date, with a maximum official boost clock of 5.8GHz on some models. So these benchmarks don’t appear to tell the whole story, with the 13700K and 13600K’s underwhelming core frequencies of just 5.1GHz and 5.3GHz

But the good news is that these chips are not official production silicon, and are probably engineering samples of some kind. Traditionally, we’ve seen engineering chips feature stock frequencies below current generation chips. So the fact that we’re already seeing engineering samples with core clocks above the current generation (Alder Lake) chips is a good sign that Raptor Lake has plenty more frequency headroom to offer.

However, we cannot discount the exceptionally quick DDR5 performance of the 13700K and 13600K in 7-Zip, where compression scores were through the roof compared to the 12700KF and 12600K. If this type of performance improvement holds true in other memory-intensive apps, we could see many more people swapping to DDR5 with the Raptor Lake launch. But only time will tell if this will become true.