According to a report by VideoCardz, a Chinese retailer has managed to grab an engineering sample of Intel's Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU and sold it online. The listing says this Core i9-13900K packs eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, with a total thread count of 32, and claims to be working on a ROG Z690 Apex motherboard. The part was sold for 2850 RMB, or about $426.
For the uninitiated, Raptor Lake is Intel's upcoming 13th generation of CPUs running on an enhanced Alder Lake architecture called Raptor Lake. We don't know all the details about Intel's new architecture just yet, but we know that Raptor Lake will pack far higher core frequencies than Alder Lake and double the number of efficiency cores -- at least on the higher-end SKUs. This listing does at least back up the core configuration of Raptor Lake, with this 13900K allegedly having 16 efficiency cores, which is double that of the Core i9-12900K.
Performance is rumored to be around 20% higher than Alder Lake (in some benchmarks), according to two reports we've seen. The chips are rumored to peak at 6 GHz, and that's before CPU overclocking. If true, Raptor Lake will be even faster when released, with enhanced core frequencies over Alder Lake. We believe part of this performance bump will result from the new Raptor Cove cores going into Raptor Lake, which will be an upgrade over Alder Lake's Golden Cove performance cores.
Raptor Lake still does not have an official release date from Intel. However, this listing seems to confirm that Raptor Lake will probably release sometime later in Q3 or Q4 of 2022. Furthermore, since this listing confirms Intel already has working engineering samples of Raptor Lake, it shouldn't be long before full production variants are prepared and ready for market.
However, it's worth noting that none of the information listed on the Chinese site can be confirmed as real. For all we know, the Chinese faked the listing entirely. So take this information with a grain of salt.
